The average number of hours we spend at work varies dramatically by country. Previous research focuses on tax policy, social security, and labor market regulation to explain the differences. This paper builds on previous work by focusing on politics. Specifically, it examines the relationship between democracy and the average number of hours worked per person employed. Using data on the supply of labor from the Penn World Tables 9.1, I find there is an important difference between democracies and dictatorships: as GDP/capita increases, individuals in democracies spend fewer hours at work than their counterparts in dictatorships. The results are robust to various specifications of the model that account for selection bias and data that are missing not at random (MNAR). These findings imply that the elections, civil rights, and the political liberties associated with democracy influence the amount of time people spend at work.

我们花在工作上的平均小时数因国家/地区而异。以前的研究侧重于税收政策、社会保障和劳动力市场监管来解释差异。本文以政治为重点，建立在先前工作的基础上。具体来说，它考察了民主与每人就业的平均工作小时数之间的关系。使用宾夕法尼亚大学世界表 9.1 中的劳动力供应数据，我发现民主国家和独裁国家之间存在重要区别：随着 GDP/人均的增加，民主国家的个人比独裁国家的个人花费更少的工作时间。结果对模型的各种规格具有鲁棒性，这些规格说明了选择偏差和非随机缺失的数据 (MNAR)。这些发现意味着选举、公民权利、