THE INEFFICIENCY OF WORKER TIME USE

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Coviello, Decio; Ichino, Andrea; Persico, Nicola
• 署名单位: Universite de Montreal; HEC Montreal; European University Institute; University of Bologna; Northwestern University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1111/jeea.12129
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 906-947
• 关键词: management-practices; PRODUCTIVITY

摘要

Much work is carried out in short, interrupted segments. This phenomenon, which we label task juggling, has been overlooked by economists. We study the work schedules of some judges in Italy documenting that they do juggle tasks and that juggling causally lowers their productivity substantially. To measure the size of this effect, we show that although all these judges receive the same workload, those who juggle more trials at once instead of working sequentially on few of them at each unit of time, take longer to complete their portfolios of cases. Task juggling seems to have no adverse effect on the quality of the judges' decisions, as measured by the percent of decisions appealed. To identify these causal effects we estimate models with judge fixed effects and we exploit the lottery assigning cases to judges. We discuss whether task juggling can be viewed as inefficient, and provide a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the social cost of longer trials due to task juggling.