[Excerpt] In the United States, proposals have been periodically introduced into Congress to amend the provisions of the Fair Labour Standards Act (FLSA) to restrict the use of overtime hours and stimulate employment growth. This report summarizes the research I have conducted since 1970 on the likely effects of these proposed policy changes and my appraisal of their desirability. Although all of the empirical results I discuss pertain to United States data, they suggest the type of empirical analyses that should be undertaken with Canadian data before decisions about policy changes are made here. I begin in the first main section with a brief history of hours of work legislation in the United States that includes a conceptual framework that I have found useful in analyzing proposed changes in hours legislation. The variety of empirical analyses I have undertaken that pertain to the wisdom of raising the overtime premium are discussed in the second section. My analyses of proposals to require employee consent prior to the working of overtime are discussed in the third section. The paper ends with some brief concluding remarks.