Time use.

• Author: Hamermesh, Daniel S.
• Position: Research Summaries - Economy - Report

Until 2000, economists paid scant attention to distinctions in how people used their time other than between working for pay and not working. In part, that neglect stemmed from the realization that this simple distinction was of central importance for economic growth, unemployment, and tax policy. There was also the belief that changes in the mix of non-market activities would not affect market outcomes; and finally, there was a paucity of data on time use outside the labor market. Yet not all time away from work is the same: most people would rather watch television than wash dishes, for example.

We are now rapidly going beyond the simple work/non-work distinction, spurred partly by the burgeoning in many countries of large random samples describing people's time use. These "time diaries" record the previous day's activities, either in specific categories or with free descriptions that are then categorized by a statistical agency. The United States, which had been a laggard in developing these data, is now a leader: since 2003 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has produced its American Time Use Survey (ATUS), containing diaries kept by roughly 1000 adults each month. Many of the findings discussed in this article are based on analyses using the ATUS.

Time at Work, Chores, and Leisure

There is pretty good evidence that paid work time has not changed greatly in the United States in the past four decades. Men are working less, women more. But until the advent of large-scale time use surveys in the United States, we could not know how time outside work has changed. Are we engaging in more leisure activities? Spending more time caring for our children, aged parents, houses, pets--things that we could pay somebody to do for us, what we call household production? Put bluntly, are we having more fun, or just doing more unpaid work-like activities?

Economists are now able to answer these questions. Of course, the answers depend on how we define non-work activities. The general trends seem pretty clear, though: 1) Time diaries corroborate the conclusions from household surveys in which people respond to questions about how many hours they worked in the past week. On average, there has been little change in paid work time, with men cutting back on work, women increasing it, but not to men's levels. 2) Since 1965, time spent in household production activities has dropped. But that decline hides sharply different trends by gender: women are spending less time on household production, men more, but still less than women. Defining total work as work-for-pay-plus-household-production, it is clear the total has dropped since the mid-1960s in the United States. 3) Although the sources of men's and women's newly free time differ, both sexes are now spending more time in leisure activities. Whether we're happier or not, we are more involved in activities that most people would regard as leisure. (1)

This increase in leisure time has not been spread evenly among all adult Americans. Among college graduates, leisure has hardly increased at all. For those who made it only to or through high school, there have been large increases in leisure time. These differences should make one think about the net effects of the sharp rises in earnings and income inequality that have occurred in the United States over these decades. While the...