Parkinson's law first published in an article of 1955 states: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

This observation by C. N. Parkinson is finding now a quantitative justification in a recent arxiv preprint.

Peter Klimeck and collaborators at the University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute have recently reported the results of numerical simulations:

"Within the proposed model it becomes possible to work out the phase diagram under which conditions bureaucratic growth can be confined. In our last model we assign individual efficiency curves to workers throughout their life in administration, and compute the optimum time to send them to old age pension, in order to ensure a maximum of efficiency within the body – in Parkinson’s words we compute the ’Pension Point’ " they claim.

Another of Parkinson's findings stating that "committees with more than 20 members are unstable", or in other words, that there is a threshold value for the committee size above which it becomes inefficient was also tested by the austrian-american team.