Working hours and workers’ health: Long-run evidence from a nationwide policy in Sweden

with Martin Karlsson (Universität Duisburg-Essen) and Nikolaos Prodromidis (Universität Duisburg-Essen)

Regulating working hours is one of the oldest concerns of employment legislation due to its importance for protecting workers‘ physical and mental health and maintaining labour productivity. We provide new evidence for the causal effect of reduced working hours on mortality using full population register, exploiting exogenous variation from a massive nationwide policy in Sweden that reduced the working hours from 56 to 48 hours for about 1 in 4 salaried workers. Exploiting variation across occupations using difference-in-differences and event-study models, we show that lower working hours decreased mortality by around 20\%, with effects primarily driven by reductions in heart diseases and workplace accidents, and increased longevity of affected workers by around 0.6 years. Our results imply that many lives could be saved worldwide by reducing excessive working hours for labour-intensive occupations.