Advertising and labour supply: why do Americans work such long hours?

This paper advances the view that the intensity of creation of wants through advertising and marketing might be an influence on decisions made by Americans about how much time they should devote to paid work and how much time to leisure. In exploring this argument, we employ vector auto‐regression analysis to estimate long‐run supply schedules for US workers in the twentieth century. We find that advertising expenditure is significant in determining US hours of work, thus providing support for the hypothesis that preferences over work–leisure choices are malleable and are manipulated by the marketing effort.