October 2014

IZA DP No. 8561: The Labor Supply of Self-Employed Workers: The Choice of Working Hours in Worker Co-ops

published in: Journal of Comparative Economics, 2015, 43 (3), 677-689

Workers in cooperatives are self-employed workers and, if they resemble employees in conventional workplaces, they care about the length of their working hours. In this paper, their choice of hours is characterized as a conventional labor supply decision and a familiar hours-wage relationship is derived. This is estimated using mill-year observations on the plywood co-ops in the Pacific Northwest. The results are compared with those from the work behavior of other self-employed workers and with working hours in capitalist plywood mills.