Time: At Work and Not at Work | 2025 Morley Gunderson Lecture in Industrial Relations and Labour Economics (HYBRID EVENT)

Join us for our 2025 Morley Gunderson Lecture in Industrial Relations and Labour Economics, Time: At Work and Not at Work, delivered by Daniel Hamermesh, professor emeritus of economics at Royal Holloway University of London & University of Texas at Austin. We will also award the 2025 Morley Gunderson Prize to alumnus, Tony Fang, Professor and Stephen Jarislowsky Chair in Economic and Cultural Transformation, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Department of Economics.

This is a free event and all are welcome. Seating is limited, so please ensure you RSVP early to attend in-person. Alternatively, you can attend virtually via livestream.

Abstract | Time is our scarcest resource. Compared to income, the amount of time at our disposal has grown much less rapidly over the last century. That’s true in rich countries, like Canada and the U.S., but is increasingly also true in less developed countries. For the average working adult, work time constitutes barely 20 percent of the typical week. It is only the second most common activity, being far behind sleep time, but slightly ahead of TV-watching; and yet, economists and others analyze work time much more thoroughly than the more important non-work time. This lecture discusses both work and non-work, concentrating particularly on differences in how time is spent across such characteristics as gender, age, immigrant status, and income, and on how it is used differently across counties. Dr. Daniel Hamermesh focuses on how the shortage of time affects behavior, and how these effects differ across these same demographic and economic characteristics. He asks the question: What would we do with the extra time if we suddenly got more time each day, week, or year? The answer is surprising and fairly distressing, but his talk culminates with a discussion of policies that might make the increasing scarcity of time less burdensome.

Daniel S. Hamermesh is an emeritus professor of economics at Royal Holloway University of London, and the University of Texas at Austin. He also taught at Michigan State University, Princeton University and has held visiting professorships at universities in Europe, Asia and Australia. His A.B. is from the University of Chicago (1965), his Ph.D. from Yale (1969). His research, published in over 100 refereed papers in scholarly journals, has concentrated on time use, labor demand, discrimination, academic labor markets and unusual applications of labor economics (to beauty, sleep and suicide). His magnum opus, Labor Demand, was published by Princeton University Press in 1993. The same press published his Beauty Pays in 2011. In 2019 Oxford University Press published his Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource. Hamermesh is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society of Labor Economists, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and Past President of the Society of Labor Economists and of the Midwest Economics Association. In 2013 he received the biennial Mincer Award for Lifetime Contributions to Labor Economics of the Society of Labor Economists; the annual IZA Prize in Labor of the Institute for the Study of Labor; and the biennial John R. Commons Award of the international undergraduate economics honor society OΔE. His undergraduate teaching, particularly of large classes in introductory economics, has gained him several University-wide teaching awards.

The Morley Gunderson Lecture in Industrial Relations and Labour Economics is jointly sponsored by the Centre for Industrial Relations & Human Resources, the Department of Economics, and Woodsworth College. It was established in 2015 in recognition of the interconnections between the three units, and named for Professor Morley Gunderson to honour his contributions to Canadian labour economics and industrial relations over the past five decades.