Work and Taxes: Allocation of Time in OECD Countries
发现OECD国家总工作时间的长期变化远超商业周期波动，呼吁政策制定者关注低频趋势而非仅关注短期波动，对理解税收与福利政策有启示。
Policymakers devote a great deal of attention to short-run fluctuationsin the labor market. Central banks monitor indicators of labormarket tightness in the conduct of monetary policy due to the poten-tial implications for inflation. Fiscal authorities are concerned with the budget consequences of fluctuations in the labor market because they affect both revenues and expenditure programs. More generally, these fluctuations may be associated with significant losses in welfare. The motivation of this article stems from a striking empirical obser-vation about long-run variations in labor market outcomes: Long-run changes in total hours of work in OECD countries exceed the variation of hours worked over the business cycle in a representative country (say, the United States) by almost an order of magnitude. If understanding changes in hours of work of the magnitude of business cycle fluctuations is an important policy concern, then understanding the sources of these trend differences is also crucial. Surprisingly, the academic and policy debates have focused on the business cycle movements in the labor market, almost ignoring low frequency changes. Andrea Raffo is an economist in Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of