This has important policy implications: it means that rather than being a reflection of what Europeans want, low work hours are making Europeans worse off than they could be. According to his calculations, the French would be exactly 19% better off if they adopted American rates of taxes and spending, which would lead them to work as much as Americans, which would give them extra goods that they would enjoy just as much as Americans do.
Oddly, Prescott didn't offer any information about preferences: he just found that a formula including tax rates helped to predicted time at work for seven countries, especially the decline in work hours in France and Germany between the 1970s and 1990s. But the predictions weren't perfect, leaving open the possibility that something else (like preferences) might also be involved. The World Values Survey of 1981 asked people whether various possible changes in society would be good or bad. One was "decrease in the importance of work in our lives." Here is a graph showing the relationship between average opinions on that question (higher values mean approval) and actual changes in work hours.
Here's a graph showing the relationship between the changes predicted from Prescott's formula and the actual changes.
Change in work hours seems to be more strongly related to preferences than to the tax/consumption formula, and a regression analysis confirms this. With just seven cases, neither one has a statistically significant effect, so a skeptic might say we can't be sure that either one makes a difference. But at least we can definitely reaffirm common sense: Americans, French, and Japanese don't have similar preference about work and leisure.
The WVS included a number of other countries, so I'll show their rankings, from most to least positive views of "a decrease in the importance of work."
France
Argentina
Iceland
Finland
Hungary
Spain
Belgium
Netherlands
Australia
(West) Germany
Denmark
Britain
Canada
Mexico
Italy
Ireland
USA
South Africa
Sweden
Norway
Korea
Japan
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