Much work is carried out in short, interrupted segments. This phenomenon, which we label task juggling, has been overlooked by economists. We study the work schedules of some judges in Italy documenting that they do juggle tasks and that juggling causally lowers their productivity substantially. To measure the size of this effect, we show that although all these judges receive the same workload, those who juggle more trials at once instead of working sequentially on few of them at each unit of time, take longer to complete their portfolios of cases. Task juggling seems to have no adverse effect on the quality of the judges’ decisions, as measured by the percent of decisions appealed. To identify these causal effects we estimate models with judge fixed effects and we exploit the lottery assigning cases to judges. We discuss whether task juggling can be viewed as inefficient, and provide a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the social cost of longer trials due to task juggling.

The inefficiency of worker time use / andrea ichino; nicola persico; decio coviello. - In: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION. - ISSN 1542-4766. - STAMPA. - 13:5(2015), pp. 906-947. [10.1111/jeea.12129]

The inefficiency of worker time use

ICHINO, ANDREA;
2015

Abstract

Much work is carried out in short, interrupted segments. This phenomenon, which we label task juggling, has been overlooked by economists. We study the work schedules of some judges in Italy documenting that they do juggle tasks and that juggling causally lowers their productivity substantially. To measure the size of this effect, we show that although all these judges receive the same workload, those who juggle more trials at once instead of working sequentially on few of them at each unit of time, take longer to complete their portfolios of cases. Task juggling seems to have no adverse effect on the quality of the judges’ decisions, as measured by the percent of decisions appealed. To identify these causal effects we estimate models with judge fixed effects and we exploit the lottery assigning cases to judges. We discuss whether task juggling can be viewed as inefficient, and provide a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the social cost of longer trials due to task juggling.
2015
The inefficiency of worker time use / andrea ichino; nicola persico; decio coviello. - In: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION. - ISSN 1542-4766. - STAMPA. - 13:5(2015), pp. 906-947. [10.1111/jeea.12129]
andrea ichino; nicola persico; decio coviello
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/382049
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