Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| A recent study found that, on average, Europeans work fewer hours than Americans do. 
 
 According to the paper, Americans work nearly 25% more hours than Europeans. In other words, that’s an additional 258 hours per year or an hour more each weekday. The working paper, which has not yet been published, was written by three economists—Alexander Bick of Arizona State University, Bettina Bruggeman of McMaster University in Ontario, and Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln of Goethe University Frankfurt. 
 
 The authors looked at 18 European countries and the U.S. Of the 19 total countries they examined, the U.S. came out on top averaging 26.1 hours per person per week; Italy worked the fewest hours with an average of 18.4 hours. 
 
 The study looked at hours per person. It doesn’t only include people currently in the workforce, but those either retired or taking time off for some other reason, like unemployment or vacation. Ultimately, it doesn’t measure productivity, but rather total time spent at work. 
 
 The disparity in hours worked between the U.S. and Europe could be explained in various ways or, more likely, is an amalgamation of numerous different reasons. Taxes, for one, are much higher in Europe than in the U.S. According to Bloomberg, that gives European workers less incentive to work longer hours. It may also have something to do with labor unions, which generally have more power in Europe than they do in the U.S. 
 
 Additionally, Europeans tend to get generous pensions, rather than investment plans like the 401(k) many American workers receive. As a result, there are more American workers over 65-years-old now than there have been at any point in the past 50 years.
– Feel like you're working too much? Consider moving to Europe: Europeans work 19% fewer hours than US workers, or about one hour less per weekday, a new paper finds. Researchers looked at three labor-force surveys from the US and Europe to find out how many hours a person works, on average, in various countries. They found that Americans work an average of 1,353 hours per year, the highest number of the 19 countries studied, Fortune reports. Compare that to Italy, where each person only works an average of 960 hours per year, the lowest number of hours of any country studied. Americans are also retiring later, taking less vacation time, and, as Quartz reports, are more likely to work odd hours, such as the middle of the night or weekends. As recently as the early 1970s, US and Western European workers actually clocked about the same number of hours, Bloomberg reports. It's not clear what's changed or how to account for the discrepancy, but some economists point to the fact that there's more incentive to work harder for a promotion in the US, because people earn a wider range of incomes there than in Europe, so it's more likely they'll get a significant raise. There's also the fact that taxes are significantly higher in Europe, meaning that there's less of an incentive to work more hours and earn more money that will be taxed. Finally, there's the fact that labor unions and worker protections are stronger in Europe, and pensions are more generous there.