Chapter 1 Labor supply of men: A survey This chapter presents a survey on the labor supply of men. This survey of male labor supply covers the determinants of whether men work for pay in the labor market and if so the determinants of their hours of work. The chapter also discusses the work behavior of men prior to their retirement from the labor force. Moreover even though there are noteworthy investigations into the labor supply of men in many different countries this survey is restricted almost entirely to the Anglo American literature. The chapter identifies the major time series and cross section empirical regularities in male labor supply behavior. It is these that any economic theory should be designed to address. The chapter presents the canonical static model of labor supply and then immediately proceeds to deal with the problems in applying this model at the aggregative level. The static model is amended to handle the situation of nonlinear budget constraints. The chapter concludes with an outline of the most popular life cycle model of labor supply. The chapter also addresses the issues in and results from the estimation of the static model. Problems in specifying the model are first considered and then the results are presented from the U.S. nonexperimental literature the British literature and the U.S. experimental literature. The chapter also discusses the estimates from the applications of the life cycle model.