Work and television

In OECD countries, watching television is by far the most time-consuming form of leisure. Surprisingly, television viewing is positively correlated with work hours across countries. A simple model based on the notion of aggregate strategic complementarities in social leisure, that explains such a pattern as the result of multiple equilibria, is developed. Workers and capitalists are shown to exhibit opposite preference orderings over equilibria. The relative ability of the two groups in influencing a country's government may explain which equilibrium is selected.