Measuring trends in leisure: The allocation of time over five decades
BibTeX
@article{aguiar2007measuring,
title={Measuring trends in leisure: The allocation of time over five decades},
author={Aguiar, Mark and Hurst, Erik},
journal={The quarterly journal of economics},
volume={122},
number={3},
pages={969--1006},
year={2007},
publisher={MIT Press}
}
Abstract
In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we show that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. Alternatively, the “consumption equivalent” of the increase in leisure is valued at 8 to 9 percent of total 2003 U.S. consumption expenditures. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing “inequality” in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.
Notes and Excerpts
In commonly used household surveys designed to measure labor market activity (such as the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)), the only category of time use that is consistently measured is market work hours. 1…1 In some years, the PSID asks respondents to individually report the amount of time they spent on household chores during a given week. These data are exploited by Roberts and Rupert (1995) to document a decline in total work, which, for the overlapping periods, is consistent with the trends documented in this paper.
The fact that the least-educated experience the most leisure poses an empirical puzzle for the standard model that relies solely on income and substitution effects: The time-series evidence suggests that rising incomes induce greater leisure, while the recent cross-sections suggest that higher incomes are associated with lower levels of leisure.
Between this and the modified consumer’s problem, this looks like a good teaching example.
To document the trends in the allocation of time over the last 40 years, we link five major time use surveys: 1965-1966 America’s Use of Time; 1975-1976 Time Use in Economics and Social Accounts; 1985 Americans’ Use of Time; 1992-1994 National Human Activity Pattern Survey; and the 2003 American Time Use Survey. The Data Appendix and Table 1 describe these surveys in detail. In this section, we characterize four major uses of time: market work, non-market production, child care, and “leisure.”
Repr Consumer’s Problem
Consumer’s problem is
\[\max_{x_1,x_2,h_1,h_2,L} \delta\ln c_1 + (1-\delta) \ln c_2 \\ \text{s.t. } q_1 c_1 + q_2 c_2 = w\]and where
\[c_1 = \left(x_1^{\sigma-1\over\sigma}+h_1^{\sigma-1\over\sigma}\right)^{\sigma\over\sigma-1}\\ c_2 = \left(x_2^{\eta-1\over\eta}+h_2^{\eta-1\over\eta}\right)^{\eta\over\eta-1}\\ q_1 = \left(p_1^{1-\sigma}+w^{1-\sigma}\right)^{1\over1-\sigma}\\ q_2 = \left(p_2^{1-\eta}+w^{1-\eta}\right)^{1\over1-\eta}\\\]Latter two unit costs are implied by cost minimization.
Time constraint is implicit in the budget constraint.
Elasticity params $\sigma > 1$ and $\eta < 1$ mean that time use $h_1$ is akin to home production, while time use $h_2$ is akin to leisure.