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Work More, Make Much More? The Relationship between Lifetime Hours Worked and Lifetime Earnings
FRB of St. Louis
2024.03.13
Earnings inequality in the U.S. and around the globe is a major topic of research among economists. A key objective of this research is to isolate the quantitatively important forces that shape inequality. Two recent On the Economy blog posts focused on the role of job mobility and job risk. In this post, we consider a factor that has been largely neglected so far by the literature, namely differences among individuals in hours worked. In particular, we investigate the relationship between lifetime earnings inequality and lifetime hours worked. In line with many empirical studies, lifetime here refers to ages 25 to 55, a person’s prime working years.

In this blog post, we focus on male workers, who were more likely to have uninterrupted employment histories than female workers during the period we are examining. We are able to construct a sample of 3,006 male workers for whom we have observations of earnings, weeks worked and weekly hours worked for each age from 25 to 55 (either via a direct report or via a simple imputation procedure for missing observations). Since we are interested in lifetime earnings, our sample already conditions on having worked in at least one year between 25 and 55.

We start by examining the distribution of lifetime hours worked and then analyze the relationship between lifetime hours worked and lifetime earnings.