Does Working Long Hours Cause Marital Dissolution? Evidence from the Reduction in South Korea’s Workweek Standard

Abstract

Despite its important policy implications, little is known about the possible impact on marital dissolution of a workweek standard, which sets the maximum working hours for full-time salaried workers and, hence, tends to restrict their overtime work. Moreover, evidence on the effect of work on the risk of divorce has come predominantly from noncausal studies on the work status of women in the West. The Korean government reduced its workweek standard from 44 to 40 hours, and we assess how this four-hour reduction for male and female workers has affected their marital dissolution. Between 2004 and 2011, the 40-hour standard was initially applied to larger establishments and then later to smaller ones. We create two binary variables to indicate whether a husband’s and wife’s workweek standards were reduced to 40 hours in a given year, and discrete-time event history analysis examines the association of these variables with the risk of divorce. The annual longitudinal data come from the 2000 to 2015 waves of the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study. The results show that the legislative change for husbands lowered the risk of divorce, while that for wives had no significant impact. We speculate that the effect on men may be attributable to the reduction in their actual workweeks, which may have increased their interaction time with their spouses and children. By intervening in men’s overtime work, workweek standards may serve as an effective policy tool to stabilize marriage in the work-oriented, gender-unequal Asian countries.