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By age 77 a plurality of women in wealthy Western societies are widows. Comparing older (aged 70+) married women to widows in the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) 2003–2018 and linking the data to the Current Population Survey allow inferring the short- and longer-term effects of a demographic shock – husband's death – and measuring the paths of adjustment of time use to it. Widows differ from otherwise similar married women, especially from married women with working husbands, by cutting back on home production, mainly food preparation and housework, mostly by engaging in less of it each day, not doing it less frequently. The ratio of time to money expenditures on one item – food – is higher among married older couples than among widows. Widows are alone for 2/3 of the time they had spent with their spouses, with a small increase in time with friends and relatives shortly after becoming widowed. Older French, Italian, German, and Dutch women exhibit similar differences in time use; European widows also feel less time stress than married women. Following older women in 18 European countries before and after a partner's death shows that becoming widowed reduces their feelings of time pressure.

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.

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.

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.