Overemployment: The structure, determinants, and countermeasures of involuntarily long work hours

This paper clarifies the structure and determinants of overemployment and its two elements, involuntary fulltime employment and involuntary overtime work, after demonstrating the fact that for the mismatch of work hours that includes both overemployment and underemployment, overemployment prevails in our country. Overemployment is defined here as an excess of actual work hours over desired work hours for an employee． Its extent becomes greater, other things being equal, as the actual hours of work increases, as the desired hours of work decreases, and as the extent of association between actual and desired hours of work becomes weaker. Regular workers compared with irregular/temporary workers and men compared with women are more likely to experience overemployment despite the fact that the former group have a greater amount of desired work hours than the latter group, because the former's actual work hours exceed the latter's to even a greater extent. In particular, regular workers tend to be more overemployed than irregular/temporary workers primarily because the former's desire to work part time is very unlikely to be granted by the employer, and men tend to be more overemployed than women primarily because the former's desire not to work overtime is much less likely to be granted by the employer among fulltime employees.　Other findings include that workplaces that are flexible in time are less likely to cause overemployment, that managers/administrators are more likely than other employees to experience overemployment, that employees with a greater commuting time tend to experience more involuntary fulltime work, and that the gender gap in overemployment becomes the largest among those with a child of less than 6 years old. Finally, the paper discusses measures to mitigate overemployment in our country.