Market productivity is often greater, and leisure and other household activities more enjoyable, when people perform them simultaneously. Beyond pointing out the positive externalities of synchronicity, economists have not attempted to identify exogenous determinants of timing. We develop a...

Using microeconomic data sets from the United States and the Netherlands, this study considers how agents perceive characteristics that are discriminated against. It uses the examples of beauty and height to examine whether: 1) Absolute or relative differences in a characteristic affect...

This study uses data for the U.S. from the May 1991 CPS and for Germany from the 1990 wave of the Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) to analyze when people work during the day and week. The evidence shows: 1) Work in the evenings or at night is quite common in both countries, with around 7 percent of...

The distribution of job satisfaction widened across cohorts of young men in the U.S. between 1978 and 1988, and between 1978 and 1996, in ways correlated with changing wage inequality. Satisfaction among workers in upper earnings quantiles rose relative to that of workers in lower quantiles. An...

Eating requires the food materials that make up meals and also time devoted to buying food, preparing meals and eating them, and cleaning up afterwards. Using time-diary and expenditure data for the U.S. for 1985 and 2003, I examine how income and time prices affect time and goods inputs into...

We explore how umpires' racial/ethnic preferences are expressed in their evaluation of Major League Baseball pitchers. Controlling for umpire, pitcher, batter and catcher fixed effects and many other factors, strikes are more likely to be called if the umpire and pitcher match race/ethnicity....

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...