Where Did the Time Go? The Effects of China’s Two-Day Weekend Policy on Labor Supply, Household Work, and Leisure Activities

Abstract：

This paper examines the effects of working time reduction policy on labor supply, household work, personal care, physical and leisure activities by exploiting the Chinese Two-Day Weekend Policy, which effectively reduced weekly working days from six to five in May 1995, as a natural experiment. We construct a theoretical model that predicts a decline in labor supply in both private and public sectors as work hours were reduced. In theory, the direction of time spent on household production and a second job can go either way, depending on how much agents care about household production, leisure activities or the income from a second job. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey from 1989 to 2011, we adopt a difference-in-differences strategy with various matching methods to estimate the policy effects on the work hours of wage earners in both public and private sectors relative to nonwage earners. Our results show that the policy significantly reduced the work hours of wage earners by 4% and those of the workers in the public sector by 5% while increasing the relative likelihood of having a second job by 3 percentage points and reducing the time spent on household work by approximately 100 minutes per week relative to nonwage earners. In addition, we find that the policy change significantly increased wages for both men and women but had no effects on sleep hours. In contrast to workers in Western countries, Chinese workers significantly reduced their time spent on physical activities, such as Ping Pong and Taichi, while increasing the time spent on sedentary activities, such as playing video and computer games and surfing the internet.

Speaker Biography：  

方涛教授在多伦多大学取得劳资关系和人力资源管理专业博士学位，现任西华大学国际经济管理研究院特聘院长，纽芬兰纪念大学Stephen Jarislowsky讲席教授，加拿大多伦多大学兼职教授, 美国新泽西大学J. Robert Beyster研究员, 世界银行“移民与发展”专家咨询委员会专家。他曾担任美国哈佛大学访问教授，沃顿商学院访问教授, 澳大利亚莫纳什大学国际商务硕士专业主任，约克大学人力资源管理与劳资关系终身教授。他曾担任中国留美经济学会会长。2017年，他当选为英国皇家艺术院Fellow (FRSA, Fellow, Royal Society of Arts)。