The Cultural Cost of Overwork: Evidence from Switzerland’s Röstigraben

Abstract

Does culture shape how burdensome overtime work feels to workers? We exploit Switzerland’s linguistic border, the Röstigraben, where French- and German-speaking workers share the same labor laws but inherit different attitudes toward work and leisure. Using data from the Swiss Household Panel (1999–2023), we show that each extra hour beyond the contract raises work-life interference by 0.038 points (on a 0–10 scale) more for German-speaking workers than for French-speaking workers, an effect that is modest in absolute terms (0.12 within-person standard deviations at mean overwork) but represents a 152% amplification of the French-speaking baseline. This cultural amplification is concentrated among part-time workers, for whom contractual hours more explicitly demarcate the work-leisure boundary; the effect vanishes when the hours gap is measured relative to habitual rather than contractual hours, consistent with a reference-point mechanism. Despite bearing higher psychological costs, German-speaking workers do not detectably adjust their labor supply differently at the annual horizon: they do not correct overwork episodes faster, do not bunch more tightly at contractual hours, and do not exit overwork situations through job changes.