Author: Yonggeun Jung(University of Florida)

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This paper investigates the pre-weekend decline in productivity by leveraging a unique quasi-experiment: the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) 2022 weekend shift from Friday-Saturday to Saturday-Sunday. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) framework, we analyze high-frequency proxies for work-related attentiveness, including a novel Google Trends index and Dubai’s financial market volume. We show that the engagement dip did not vanish but shifted from Thursday to Friday in line with the new weekend. This causal evidence demonstrates that the decline arises from the day’s status as the pre-weekend. The findings, confirmed through robust placebo and bootstrap tests, suggest that the workweek’s structure itself drives end-of-week behavior and offer implications for alternative work schedule policies.