We exploit time use data from Denmark and the United States to examine the impact institutions and social norms have on individuals' bargaining power within a household, hypothesizing that the more generous social welfare system and more egalitarian social norms in Denmark will mitigate the...

This paper argues that public holidays facilitate the co-ordination of leisure time but do not constrain the annual amount of leisure. Public holidays therefore have benefits both in the utility of leisure on holidays and (by enabling people to maintain social contacts more easily) in increasing...

Retirement ages among older Americans have only recently begun to increase after a precipitous fifty-year decline. Early retirement may result from incentives provided by retirement systems; but it may also result from the rigidities imposed by market work schedules. Using the American Time Use...

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the substitutions between market and home production and on the structural transformation between agriculture, manufacturing and...

As mothers have increased their paid work efforts, conflicts between employment and family responsibilities have grown. This evolution has led researchers to explore more fully the role that caregiving responsibilities play in mothers' time choices. We study this issue using data from the 2003...

Using detailed time-use data for seven industrialized countries from the 1970s until today we document general decreases in men's market work coupled with increases in men's unpaid work and child care, and increases in women's paid work and child care coupled with decreases in unpaid work. We...

This paper exploits the complex sequential structure of the diary data in the American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) and constructs three classes of indicators that capture the quality of leisure ('pure leisure', 'co-present leisure' and 'leisure fragmentation') to show that the relative...

In the scant literature on partners' joint retirement decisions one of the explanations for joint retirement is externalities in leisure. In this study, we investigate how retirement affects the hours of leisure together of individuals in a couple. Exploiting the law on retirement age in France,...

How would people spend additional time if confronted by permanent declines in market work? We examine the impacts of cuts in legislated standard hours that raised employers' overtime costs in Japan around 1990 and Korea in the early 2000s. Using time-diaries from before and after these shocks,...

This article uses data from the 1998-1999 French INSEE time use survey to estimate the time costs of children. The focus is on couples with two spouses working Full-Time in the labor force in order to avoid issues of substitution between home production and labor supply. Time costs are computed...