Labour And Production

[A Former User]

Labour is work; for example the welding, assembling, and testing required to make a car. Work activity is often difficult to measure, which is an important point in later units because employers find it difficult to determine the exact amount of work that their employees are doing. We also cannot measure the effort required by different activities in a comparable way (for example, baking a cake versus building a car), so economists often measure labour simply as the number of hours worked by individuals engaged in production, and assume that as the number of hours worked increases, the amount of goods produced also increases.

As a student, you make a choice every day: how many hours to spend studying. There may be many factors influencing your choice: how much you enjoy your work, how difficult you find it, how much work your friends do, and so on. Perhaps part of the motivation to devote time to studying comes from your belief that the more time you spend studying, the higher the grade you will be able to obtain at the end of the course. In this unit, we will construct a simple model of a student’s choice of how many hours to work, based on the assumption that the more time spent working, the better the final grade will be.

We assume a positive relationship between hours worked and final grade, but is there any evidence to back this up? A group of educational psychologists looked at the study behaviour of 84 students at Florida State University to identify the factors that affected their performance.1
Elizabeth Ashby Plant, Karl Anders Ericsson, Len Hill, and Kia Asberg. 2005. ‘Why study time does not predict grade point average across college students: Implications of deliberate practice for academic performance.’ Contemporary Educational Psychology 30 (1): pp. 96–116. Close footnote

At first sight there seems to be only a weak relationship between the average number of hours per week the students spent studying and their Grade Point Average (GPA) at the end of the semester.

The 84 students have been split into two groups according to their hours of study. The average GPA for those with high study time is 3.43—only just above the GPA of those with low study time.

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[A Former User]

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