Time Use in Economics: Volume 51

Using the American and the French time-use surveys, we examine whether people have a preference for a more diversified mix of activities, in the sense that they experience greater well-being when their time schedule contains many different activities rather than is concentrated on a very small number. This could be due to decreasing marginal utility, as is assumed for goods consumption, if each episode of time is conceived as yielding a certain level of utility per se. With returns to specialization, people would then face a trade-off between efficiency and diversity in choosing how to allocate time. We examine these issues and investigate potential gender differences, considering both instantaneous feelings and life satisfaction.

This chapter analyzes detailed 24-hour diary data from the United States to provide evidence on the relationship between workers' effort and well-being while at work. In doing so, we first measure workers' effort in terms of the amount of on-the-job leisure, number of on-the-job leisure episodes, and the time working until consuming on-the-job leisure. Second, we link these three measures of worker effort to data on instantaneous well-being while at work. We find that the less time devoted to on-the-job leisure and the number of on-the-job leisure episodes, and the more time workers spend working until on-the-job-leisure, the higher the levels of stress during their work tasks. In analyzing workers' effort and stress during market work activities, we contribute to the scant literature on the determinants of worker happiness while at work, positing the consumption and the frequency of on-the-job leisure as affective factors.

Using the two waves of the India Time Use Survey, 1998–1999 and 2019, we document a 110-minute (30%) increase in average daily learning time. The largest offsetting decrease was in work time: 61 minutes. The composition of leisure changed, with television rising by 19 minutes, while talking fell by 10 minutes and games by 17 minutes. We then implement a Gelbach decomposition, showing that 68 minutes of the unconditional learning increase are predicted by demographic covariates. Of these predictors the most important are a child's state of residence and usual principal activity, which captures extensive-margin transitions into schooling.

The community in which a child is raised has a substantial effect on their income in adulthood. To help understand what is different about communities which produce higher incomes, we document how time use differs between communities which increase their members' future incomes more. The main differences are that, in areas which produce higher incomes, people spend more time at work, and adults spend more time with children. The data do not support some theories of what makes communities effective at producing human capital: People do not spend more time on educational activities, or on community events and institutions, in areas which increase incomes by more.

Parental job loss has been shown to have a negative impact on a large number of children's outcomes, in particular for low-income children. Given the amount of time freed up by loss of employment and the fact that active time with one's children appears to be a productive input in their human capital production function, increases in the time parents spend with their children have the potential to positively impact a child or to counteract other negative consequences of parental job loss. This chapter studies how low- and higher-income parents change their time investment in their children when faced with job loss. Using national time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) linked to longitudinal labor market data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), I find that parents spend almost 15% of the time freed up by job loss – roughly 3.5 additional hours per week – actively with their children. Low-income parents invest their freed-up time no differently from higher-income parents. While mothers who lose their job respond by spending more time actively with their children, this adjustment is much smaller for fathers. This suggests that differential adjustments in time investment may play a role in the impact maternal versus paternal job loss has on children's outcomes.

We model the conditions under which parents optimally reallocate time to childcare when an outside agent exogenously restricts the number of hours an employer can demand of a working parent. Theoretically, when the restriction binds, a parent's available time increases. We exploit a series of voluntary and mandated labor-market reforms in South Korea that regulated the statutory and maximum work hours of parents. The government implemented the laws in stages by industry and size of firms. This implementation process generates exogenous variation across families where one or both partners worked at jobs that were or were not affected by the reform. We show the reforms affected work hours and use the predicted changes to investigate the total amount they spent on paid childcare and whether or not they changed the relative use of market and parental care. When fathers get more time (work less), parents spend less money on childcare. A change in mother's work time does not affect expenditures. When parents get more time, they are more likely to spend money on paid childcare for school-age children and more likely to use private academies.

We make use of rich microdata from the Belgian MEqIn survey, which contains detailed information on individual consumption, public consumption inside households, and time use. We explain the observed household behavior by means of a collective model that integrates marriage market restrictions on intrahousehold allocation patterns. We adopt a revealed preference approach that abstains from any functional form assumptions on individual utility functions or intrahousehold decision processes. This allows us to (set) identify the sharing rule, which governs the intrahousehold sharing of time and money, and to quantify economies of scale within households. We use these results to conduct a robust individual welfare and inequality analysis, hereby highlighting the important role of detailed consumption and time use data.

Relationships have changed dramatically in the last 50 years. Fewer couples are marrying, more are cohabiting. Reasons for this shift include more attractive labor market opportunities for women and changing social norms, but the shift may have consequences of its own. A number of models predict that those cohabiting will specialize less than those marrying. Panel data on time use – particularly housework time – as well as on the degree of specialization in more narrowly defined household tasks from the 2001–2019 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey are used to test this prediction.

The time use data for men provides only limited supporting evidence for specialization. The results for women are much stronger. Women who marry without first cohabiting increase their reported housework time more than those who enter cohabitations (by 3.7 hours versus 1.2 hours). The latter generally make up a third of the difference if they do marry. Expanding the analysis to other uses of time yields some further evidence of specialization.

Survey responses on the degree of specialization are more informative. The raw data show substantial intrahousehold specialization and further analysis reveals that on average married couples specialize more than cohabiting couples. Adding couple-specific fixed effects reveals that specialization increases when cohabiting couples marry. Interestingly, there does not appear to be a substantial tradeoff between tasks; partners who report specializing more on one task are more likely to report specializing on other tasks as well. Given the important roles couples have in family formation and the labor market, it is important to understand this intrahousehold behavior.

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred major, and possibly enduring, changes in paid work. In this chapter, we explore the continuity and change in several work day dimensions, including where it is performed, the amount of time spent working, the length of the work day, and who people are with when they work, as well as variation across population subgroups. We use nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to analyze change across the 2019 to 2021 period. While the shift to working primarily at home in 2020 is dramatic and continuing into 2021, working primarily at the workplace remains the modal experience for Americans. We find differences by gender, education, parental status, and age in which workers perform their jobs at home, and we find much more continuity in how much people work and when they work.

The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, relatively little was known about teachers' time use outside of the classroom, the blurring of work and home boundaries, and how teachers compare to similar professionals in these regards. We use daily time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 3,168 teachers and 1,886 professionals in similarly prosocial occupations from 2003 to 2019 to examine occupational differences in time use. Compared to observationally similar non-teachers, teachers spend significantly more time volunteering at their workplace and completing work outside the workplace during the school year. On average, teachers spend 19 more minutes working outside of the workplace on weekdays than observably similar non-teachers and 38 more minutes on weekends. The weekend disparity is particularly large among secondary school teachers. This suggests that before the widespread switch to online and hybrid learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were already navigating blurrier work-life boundaries than their counterparts in similar professions. This has important implications for teacher turnover and for the effectiveness and wellness of teachers who remain in the profession.