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Jiro comments on question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley? - Less Wrong
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In a sense, Silicon Valley is an ongoing study. Here you have a very large number of firms in a competitive environment, with low cost of entry, each firm looking for a productivity edge over their rivals. If holding the work-week down to 40 hours really made their employees more productive, don't you think you'd see lots of successful firms that have tried it?
And yes, I'm aware that there's signalling going on, but you'd still expect to see some successful firms that worked like that. Moreover, Silicon Valley firms go just the other way, doing everything they can to keep employees in the office by making it "fun" - that's the opposite of what a signalling explanation would predict, but strongly predicted by an "extra time in the office really is productive" theory.
Increasing the work week generally provides a short-term and more easily measured benefit (getting this project done sooner) but long-term and harder to measure harms (higher error rate and higher maintenance cost). Bean-counters are notoriously bad at trading off short-term benefit for long-term harm, and at preferring benefits which are easy to measure.
As far as I can tell, the people furthest from bean-counters work the longest hours.