This paper constructs global harmonized historical series on labour hours by gender, employment status in 57 core territories – 48 main countries and 9 residual regions – covering all world regions across the 1800-2025 period. We quantify the global decline in labour hours and relate it to the long run rise in productivity, with sizable variations across regions and periods . At the global level, hourly productivity (net domestic product per work hour) rose from about 0.7€ in 1800 to 16€ in 2025 (PPP 2025 €). In 2025, hourly productivity ranges from 4€ across Subsaharan Africa to 55-60€ in the USA, Sweden, Germany or France. In the long-run, about 35-40% of the rise in productivity was used to reduce labour hours and obtain extra leisure and 60-65% to raise production. We also stress the role of power relations and unpaid labour in the changing structure of labour hours throughout the 1800-2025 period. In particular, we find that the gender gap in hourly pay is currently much larger than usually thought once we include unpaid domestic work. Using this definition, the gender pay gap reaches 40-50% in rich countries, as opposed to 10-20% in conventional estimates. Finally, based on historical trends, we discuss future trajectories for labour hours, productivity, gender inequality and structural transformation over the 2025-2100 period. In our central scenario, we estimate that global hourly productivity could reach about 100€ in all countries by 2100, together with substantial reduction in work hours and gender gaps and large sectoral reallocation of labour time away from the most polluting sectors.

Public employment services increasingly offer assisted selection tools to help firms screen applicants in the face of rising application volumes. This type of active labor market policy consists in providing intermediaries to pre-screen and preselect applications, in order to reduce hiring costs for firms. This paper studies the value added of public intermediaries in reducing hiring costs using rich administrative data from the French unemployment agency France Travail, covering online job postings and applications from 2015 onward. Focusing on establishments that adopt assisted preselection for the first time, the study exploits the quasi-random assignment of job counselors to firms. Counselors differ systematically in their screening leniency, providing a judge-design–style source of exogenous variation. Preliminary results indicate that more lenient screening, leading to larger shortlists, significantly improves fill rates and accelerates posting dynamics. More restrictive shortlists appear to miss valuable matches, suggesting that broader candidate sets help reduce hiring frictions.

Age discrimination remains a significant barrier in the French labor market, despite policies aimed at extending working lives. This study provides the first experimental evidence on the role of human capital stereotypes in hiring decisions for senior workers. Using a large-scale correspondence study with over 12,000 applications, we examine how distance to retirement, inter-firm mobility, and training influence callback rates. Our results show a strong age penalty across four occupations: on average, the probability of receiving a callback falls by one third between ages 59 and 62, declining from 12.5% to 8.1%. We then examine whether this penalty can be explained by differences in retirement horizon, recent training, or career mobility. Taken separately, none of these dimensions has a statistically significant effect However, when combined, these signals allow a 62-year-old candidate to catch up with a 59-year-old, and a 59-year-old to catch up with a 49-year-old. We also document heterogeneity by contract type: extending the retirement horizon has a positive and statistically significant effect for permanent contracts (CDI), but a negative effect for fixed-term contracts (CDD). Overall, these findings indicate that increasing seniors’ remaining work horizon alone is insufficient to eliminate age-related hiring penalties. Supporting career trajectories upstream remains a necessary condition for improving older workers’ labor market prospects.

This paper uses extended series on income and wealth inequality from the World Inequality Database covering all world regions over the 1800-2025 period, together with new series on hourly productivity and human capital expenditure, to revisit the relationship between equality and development, with a much broader comparative and historical perspective than previous studies. Over the long run, we find a strong positive association between equality and productivity. Our proposed interpretation is that the rise of inclusive “social-democratic” institutions (including extended access to human capital, public services and democratic participation) led both to more equality and higher productivity, particularly in Western and Nordic Europe. We discuss the implications for future sustainable development strategies.