Are the French Happy with the 35-Hours Workweek?

O supracitado paper, da autoria de Marcello M. Estevão (IMF) and Filipa Sá (MIT), pretende analisar os efeitos da redução legal do horário de trabalho para 35 horas em França.

Aiming at lowering unemployment, the French government mandated the reduction of the standard workweek from 39 to 35 hours in 1998 to be implemented in large firms by 2000 and in small firms by 2002. The difference in timing by firm size is used to set up a quasi-experimental design to analyze the effect of the law on workers’ welfare. The law may have worked as a coordination mechanism to improve welfare in the presence of strong positive complementarities in leisure among individuals, or it may have introduced distortions and made workers worse off. Estimates from the French Labor Force Survey for the years 1993 to 2000 suggest that the law did not make workers happier. The 35-hours mandate increased the proportion of dual-job holdings and the transitions from large to small firms, which may have been motivated by the desire to work more hours. Estimates using data on subjective satisfaction with hours of work from the Eurobarometer suggestthat those who were affected by the law became less satisfied with their hours of work. The law also increased wages in large firms relative to small firms to compensate workers for the reduction in hours and keep the same monthly income. As a result, large firms replaced some workers with cheaper unemployed individuals. The net employment effect is harder to quantify, but the estimates suggest it was not significant.