The Leisure Reversal: How Medicaid Quietly Shrank the US-Europe Work Gap

This episode explores new research that significantly challenges the long-standing narrative of Americans working considerably more hours than Europeans. It reveals that about half of this hours-worked gap has vanished, primarily due to a decline in U.S. labor force participation rather than employed individuals reducing their hours. Listeners will learn how this macroeconomic shift contradicts decades of economic understanding, stemming back to influential work by Edward Prescott, and the sophisticated methodology used to uncover these findings.