Michael Burda - Sciences Po Spire

1 Introduction
Most cultural and religious traditions have holidays and weekly days of rest
to allow for leisure, family activities, or scholarly contemplation. While it is
easy to think of economic reasons why God might have commanded us to
stop working from time to time, it is not clear why He commanded us all to
rest at the same time. 1 Indeed, standard models generally tell us little about
when leisure should be enjoyed. On the one hand, it is evidently desirable
to coordinate leisure with our fellow humans; positive externalities can arise
from resting or enjoying free time collectively. This external effect may apply
to members of an immediate family as well as to a community or nation at
large. At the same time, negative externalities may result from coordinated
leisure or synchronized economic activity. Anyone who has visited Central
Park or the Jardin du Luxembourg on a sunny weekend can appreciate this
claim.
The dilemma of coordination applies most acutely to retail trade and
other consumer service sectors: almost by definition, these activities require
some to work while while others do not. 2 While the desynchronization of
retail hours and production schedules reduces congestion in stores, it does
so at the cost of reduced coordination of leisure, posing elements of potential
conflict in society. More generally, the recent acceleration of the trend
towards a service economy necessarily implies that some must work while
others consume or enjoy leisure.
The coordination of leisure time as a public policy concern is the subject
of the current paper. As a particular example, we investigate the theoretical
rationale and empirical effects of so-called “blue laws“ or restrictions on
shop opening hours, usually imposed on Sunday trading, but also on evening
trading in a number of European countries. 3 Although these laws have been
abolished in many US jurisdictions over the past three decades, they remain
1 Similarly, it is difficult to explain the existence of the weekend, which unlike days,
months and years, has no basis in solar or lunar cycles, yet evidently coordinates activity
all over the world. For an exposition of the origins of the weekend, see Rybczynski (1991).
2 In the case of retail, goods themselves can be stored and held at home while shops
are closed; but the provision, marketing and sale of goods — the primary activities of the
retail sector — cannot.
3 According to Laband and Heinbuch (1987), the origin of the term “blue laws“ is
ambiguous. According to one source, the first codification New Haven Colony’s laws
appeared on blue-colored paper; another account links “blue“ to the strictness of devotion
with which these laws were observed by North American Puritans.
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