The effect of California's daily overtime law on hours of work: A re-examination

Abstract

In California overtime is based on a daily, rather than a weekly standard. Using a variety of datasets we examine the effects of California’s daily overtime law on hours worked. Part of the analysis takes advantage of several changes in the California law that occurred during the 1990s, while other cross-sectional analysis uses data on daily hours. We compare outcomes for covered workers in California to various controls groups and, where possible, we use information on work schedules identify more precisely the workers for whom the California law is not redundant to the federal weekly overtime standard. Results using cross-state and time series variation in legislation find little effect of daily overtime. However, results exploiting within-state variation find significant negative effects of daily overtime on weekly hours.