Abstract
Has leisure increased over the last century? Standard measures of hours worked suggest that it has. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive measure of non-leisure hours that includes market work, home production, commuting and schooling for the last 105 years. We also present empirical and theoretical arguments for a definition of “per capita” that encompasses the entire population. The new measures reveal a number of interesting 20th Century trends. First, 70 percent of the decline in hours worked has been offset by an increase in hours spent in school. Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, average hours spent in home production are actually slightly higher now than they were in the early part of the 20th Century. Finally, leisure per capita is approximately the same now as it was in 1900.
A complete accounting of non-leisure time must include time spent in home production. Xenophon (4th century BC) believed that home production was as important as market production, and devoted half of his work Oeconomicus to issues of household management (Leeds (1917)). More recently, Becker’s (1965) article made modern economists aware of the importance of measuring and modeling home production. To this end, we combine results from various studies to construct a series showing trends in the average number of hours spent on home production.
A number of cross-validation studies show time use diaries to be the most accurate source of estimates for housework (and market work for that matter) (Juster and Stafford (1985, 1991)). Thus, we use estimates based on time diary data to the extent possible.
The historical studies generally including the following activities in home production: planning, purchasing, care of family members, general cleaning, care of the house and grounds, preparing and clearing away food, making, mending, and laundry of clothing and other household textiles (Vanek (1973), page 57). Activities such as playing and talking with and reading to children are usually included in childcare in the time use studies from 1965 on. We exclude them for two reasons. First, these activities rank high on the enjoyment index and hence are more properly classified as leisure. Second, while little time was devoted to these activities in the studies from 1900 to 1965, they have become an increasingly important in terms of time expenditures. Thus, including them in home production would lead to noticeably higher estimates at the end of the sample. Our measure of childcare included in home production is basic child care plus time spent in homework help, teaching, and meeting with teachers. See the data appendix for more details.
Our studies of the time diary literature indicate that the most important distinctions are for age, gender and employment status. Our strategy for constructing total hours spent in home production is as follows. For each of the relevant age, gender and employment status cells, we first gather as much information as possible on hours of housework for that category. We then interpolate values between years of the time diary studies. Finally, we weight the estimated hours of housework of each cell by the fraction of the population that falls in that cell.
No comments:
Post a Comment