Using time-diary data from four countries we show that the unemployed spend most of the time not working for pay in additional leisure and personal maintenance, not in increased household production. There is no relation between unemployment duration and the split of time between household...

Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intra household...

The world's poor are seeing a rapid expansion in access to formal savings accounts. What is the source of savings when households are connected to a formal account? We combine a high-frequency panel survey spanning two and a half years with an experiment in which a Sri Lankan bank used mobile...

Sleep must be considered subject to choice and affected by the same economic variables that affect other uses of time. Using aggregated data for 12 countries, a cross-section of microeconomic data, and a panel of households, we demonstrate that increases in time spent in the labor market reduce...

Our study shows that the household production theory illuminates the behavior of households in the allocation of time and consumption expenditures. Among the noteworthy findings derived from our data, the various household non-market time allocations (consequently, market labor supply) cannot be...

Prior to July 2009, salaries of the members of the European Parliament were paid by their home country and there were substantial salary differences between parliamentarians representing different EU countries. Starting in July 2009, the salary of each member of the Parliament is pegged to 38.5%...

Twenty-two million families currently receive a total of $34 billion dollars in benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). In fact, the EITC is the largest cash transfer program for lower-income families at the federal level. An unusual feature of the credit is its explicit goal to use...

Recent research has documented that income inequality in the United States has increased dramatically over the prior three decades. There has been less of a consensus, however, on whether the increase in income inequality was matched by an equally large increase in consumption inequality. Most...

Why do individuals volunteer their time even when recipients receive far less value than the donor's opportunity cost? Previous models of altruism that focus on the overall impact of a gift cannot rationalize this behavior, despite its prevalence. We develop a model that relaxes this assumption,...

We use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), covering both the recent recession and the pre-recessionary period, to explore how foregone market work hours are allocated to other activities over the business cycle. Given the short time series, it is hard to distinguish business cycle...