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Although time use has received much attention by social scientists as an index of resource allocation and social relations across groups, only a few studies have carefully assessed the relative strengths and weaknesses of the existing methods of measuring time use: time diary (TD), stylized (S) respondent report, and experiential sampling method (ESM). We note the varying degree of biases that arise in part from the extent of detail in the information collected by the three methods. Using findings from our analysis of the structure of these methods, we hypothesize that there are empirical exceptions to previously reported common findings that TD provides less biased information on time use than does S-namely (a) when labor market workers report their time spent on labor market work, and (b) when the historical trend in time, rather than the absolute level, is studied. Empirical results confirm our prediction and show that, among individuals who work

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press and The Board of Regents of the University of WisconsinSystem are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACT This paper utilizes data from a Swedish household survey for 1984 (the HUS data) in combination with data on public child care fees and spaces per child by community. We argue that the subsidy rate and availability of spaces determined by the political leaders of the community is to a large extent exogenous to the household. The joint out-of-home child care and labor supply decision is analyzed by logit and ordered probit choice models. We find that the high quality public child care in Sweden encourages labor market activity of women with preschoolers even when the spouse's income is high, and that when spaces are not rationed, a lower price encourages use.

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The Wealth Dynamics of American Families, 1984-94 DURING THE 1990s, the United States has experienced substantial economic growth in both family income and wealth. The rise in wealth has occurred despite the well-documented decline in traditional saving and investment since the mid-1980s. However, because of the lack of panel data on the composition of individual wealth holdings, it has not so far been possible to analyze properly the changing patterns in household wealth accumulation or the distribution of these changes across the population. This paper introduces features of the comprehensive measures of wealth, saving, and income in the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), in particular, the supplements on household family wealth funded by the National Institute on Aging. These datacurrently available for 1984, 1989, and 1994-permit an improved understanding of a number of issues, such as generational differences in long-term saving and wealth accumulation, differences in the accumulation of wealth between African American and other households, regional differences in accumulation, and the importance for wealth McCluer for comments on earlier drafts. Financial support was provided in part by a grant from Citicorp Credit Services. The opinions expressed in the paper are those of the authors alone. 267 2. Wealth is defined to include real estate-own or main home, second home, rental real estate, land contract holdings-cars, trucks, motor homes, boats, farm or business, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, saving and checking accounts, money market funds, certificates of deposit, government savings bonds, Treasury bills, Individual Retirement Accounts, bond funds, cash value of life insurance policies, valuable collections for investment purposes, and rights in a trust or estate, less mortgage, credit card, and other debt on such assets. The measure does not include wealth in the form of private pensions or expected social security retirement benefits. For the wealth data and the imputation procedures, see appendix A.3. Dollar amounts are deflated by the Consumer Price Index and reported in 1996 dollars throughout this paper, unless noted otherwise.