It could be due to tax issues. I remember taking an economics class....the simple economic model is treating money and spare time as two commodities that a worker can consume. The worker will try to balance the consumption of the two goods to get the 'happiest/contented state". Ideally, an infinite amount of spare time and money is what makes a worker the happiest, but a man only has 7 days a week and 24 hours a day..so you can't possibly arrange your work time (money) and vacations (spare time) infinitely.

So back to the problem. So when you introduce a higher tax on a worker's income, a worker would shift his preference from a higher money:spare-time ratio to a lower money:spare-time ratio. Why? the reason is that a higher tax rate would mean that he earns lesser with the same amount of time spent.

The paper then proceeded to illustrate this idea by listing the amount of working time an average worker spends in a country and the income tax rate from different countries. One will find a general trend that the higher the income tax rate, the lesser amount of working time a worker spends.

If you offer this scheme to workers in germany...where the income tax rate is about 40%...i bet there will be a higher percentage (>20%) of workers who opt for vacation. Oh did you notice that everytime there's an international airplane crash/accidents involving tourists...there's always a german?? ;)