Competition Pressure, Work-Hour Escalation, and Welfare Trade-Offs in a China-Calibrated Agent-Based Macroeconomic System

We study how competition pressure propagates through a socio-economic system to escalate work hours and reshape welfare, using a China-calibrated agent-based stock-flow-consistent macroeconomic system. Heterogeneous households, consumption- and capital-goods firms, banks, a government and a central bank interact quarterly around an author-constructed 2017 social accounting matrix, and an empirically anchored work-hours block transmits household income-gap and employer competition pressure to effective labour, earnings, consumption and non-market time. Because the pressure responses are not identified by the data, we treat them as conditional scenario inputs and ask what system behaviour a prespecified positive response region generates. In 270 common-seed central runs, pressure raises mean weekly hours under competition by 13.75 h and competition amplifies this by an additional 10.30 h; both signs hold in all 30 seeds, and an upper-tail friction attenuates the level to 6.13 h while preserving the sign. The same pressure lowers output and consumption and raises unemployment, so longer schedules do not deliver a macro gain. Across 80 Latin-hypercube draws the two hours signs are retained in 80/80 draws. The welfare ranking depends on how involuntary non-employment is valued: under a leisure convention that credits the jobless time of unemployed households it is retained in 0/80 draws, but once anemployment-status burden χ givesnon-employmentits documented non-pecuniary weight (1.5–7× the income loss; the standard fixed-cost/search-and-matching device) the welfare ranking and the prespecified attenuation sign are retained in 80/80 draws at χ = 0.8 (Wilson 95% lower bound 0.954). The work demonstrates a robust conditional competition–hours feedback and, under a literature-grounded treatment of involuntary non-employment, a robust welfare ranking; both remain conditional, not empirically identified causal claims.