THE FLEXIBILITY OF THE WORKWEEK IN THE UNITED STATES: EVIDENCE FROM THE FIFA WORLD CUP

I. INTRODUCTION At any given time, an American worker should benefit from some flexibility in his workweek schedule. There are events whose timing overlaps with the workday and if these events are valued by the worker, consuming them will increase the quality of the worker's leisure. The possibility to reschedule his work hours, and consume a given event, will result in higher worker's utility. Perhaps the worker knows ahead of time when this event will occur and plans accordingly: for example during the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournaments in March, Saint Patrick's Day also in March, or the Presidential Inauguration in January. Alternatively, the worker will equally benefit from some work flexibility in the face of an event that is unpredictable, such as: bad weather, a natural disaster, or a sick child at home. Even though weekly schedule flexibility is important and valued by workers, it is not clear whether workers adjust their work schedule in the face of an event that overlaps with the workday, especially if consuming the event results in higher workers' utility. While workers' weekly schedule flexibility has remained relatively unexplored, economists have paid considerable attention to the market hours of American workers. For example, Costa (2000) analyzes the evolution of the workday length of the average American male between 1890 and 1991, Coleman and Pencavel (1993a, 1993b) analyze the evolution of hours worked by American workers between 1940 and 1988, and Kuhn and Lozano (2008) analyze the evolution of the length of the workweek of American workers between 1979 and 2006. Similarly, economists have been interested in understanding the tradeoff between leisure and paid labor. Recent research includes Connolly (2008), who shows that weather determines a worker's day-to-day allocation of market hours, as workers work longer hours during rainy days; or Gonzalez-Chapela (2007), who shows that as prices of recreation goods (complements of leisure) increase, American workers' hours of work increase as well. A natural extension is to ask whether workers would decrease their hours of labor in the face of an event that overlaps with the workweek. If workers' value of leisure increases from consuming such event, then it is conceivable that they would choose to consume it, rather than work at the time of the event. In this paper, I explore the workweek's schedule flexibility of American workers during the last 15 years using the exogenous variation that arises due to the format of FIFA soccer World Cup. (1) That is, unlike events that cater to the American public and may be scheduled at times when Americans reduce their work hours anyway, the World Cup game schedule and host country choice is determined mostly independently from the United States labor market or the preferences of American workers. Further, as each World Cup is hosted by a different country and played every 4 years, the time games are broadcast live in America may or may not overlap with the workday depending on the host country where the World Cup is played. This allows me to estimate the causal effect that the World Cup has on changes in a worker's weekly schedule flexibility from three independent sources of variation: across time--comparing year t with year t + i, i = 1, 2, 3; across space--the host country will determine the time games are broadcast live in the United States; lastly, the third source of variation is the time games are broadcast live in each U.S. time zone, as each match broadcast's scheduled time will differ across different time zones--potentially the same game will overlap with the workday in a time zone within the United States and not in other time zones. Empirically, I compare deviations in a worker's weekly work hours during the World Cup from his usual work schedule, with the deviations from the usual workweek of a demographically equivalent worker at other times. Importantly, and as argued above, games played in different countries are televised live at different local times, and the times that these games are televised locally will determine whether the timing of the World Cup overlaps with the worker's regular work schedule in each U. …