ABSTRACT

Despite its important implications, little is known about the possible impact on marital dissolution of workweek standards, which set the maximum working hours for full-time workers and may, therefore, reduce their likelihood of working long hours. Moreover, evidence on the effect of working hours on marital dissolution comes predominantly from non-causal studies on Western women's work status. The Korean government reduced its workweek standard from 44 to 40 hours between 2004 and 2011. A discrete-time event history analysis of longitudinal data from the 2000 to 2015 Korea Labor and Income Panel Study shows that this reduction lowered male workers’ risk of divorce. The estimated effect is large in absolute size, and we speculate about possible explanations. We cautiously call for further attention to be paid to the plausible causal link between men's overwork and marital dissolution in the work-oriented and gender-divided East Asian societies.

摘要

尽管它具有重要的意义，但对婚姻解散工作周标准可能产生的影响知之甚少，该标准规定了全职工人的最大工作时间，因此可能减少长时间工作的可能性。此外，关于工作时间对婚姻解散的影响的证据主要来自对西方女性工作状况的非因果关系研究。韩国政府在2004年至2011年期间将每周工作时间标准从44小时减少到40小时。对2000年至2015年韩国劳动和收入小组研究的纵向数据进行的离散时间事件历史分析表明，这种减少降低了男性工人的离婚风险。估计的效果绝对值很大，我们推测可能的解释。