An empirical analysis of the time allocation of Italian couples: are they responsive?

Abstract

The literature suggests that in Italy husbands contribute less to unpaid household work than in any other European country, while women have the lowest market employment rates. Here we examine the time allocation of Italian couples on which there are surprisingly few studies to date. We analyze simultaneously the time allocated by husband and wife to market work, childcare and housework, allowing for various interactions. We use data drawn from the Italian national Time Use Survey 2002-2003 for the analysis. We find that spousal time allocation is sensitive to personal and household characteristics, such as, in particular, education and children's age. Evidence shows that men married to more highly educated women spend more time with their children. The husband's own characteristics have less of an effect on women's time allocation. We also find that patterns differ substantially between weekends and weekdays. The estimated correlations between the unobservable factors affecting the couple's time allocation suggest that the time devoted by parents to childcare is complementary and that the time they devote to housework is substitutable across weekends and other weekdays.

Couples’ arts participation: assessing individual and joint time use

“…As expected, the weekend is by far the preferred time of the week for arts participation and allocated time, which confirms general results for Italian couples (Bloemen et al 2010). While wives are more likely to participate, husbands spend relatively more time on these activities during this part of the week.…”

“…In particular, Italian wives have the lowest employment rates, and their husbands contribute the least to unpaid housework (Bloemen et al 2010). If we consider paid and non-paid work together, Italian women work 28 % hours more than men (Beblo 2001).…”

“…This is remarkable, since men typically do more paid work than women, and therefore should profit relatively more of 'free' days such as weekends. Possible explanations for these differences between husbands and wives may include women's preferences for more social, lighter arts activities compared to more solitary, creative, effortful ones, as well as family burdens, such as taking care of children, typically relegated to wives in Italy, and their weekly distribution (Bloemen et al 2010).…”

“…Joint leisure time is expected to be lowered by the presence of children (e.g. Hallberg 2003;Bloemen et al 2010;Silva and Le Roux 2011). Yet cultural activities that can also be done together with children could favour cultural participation as an educational activity.…”

Grandparental availability for child care and maternal labor force participation: pension reform evidence from Italy

“…These estimates imply that women whose children are under 11 and whose mothers are pension eligible are 11% (6.5 percentage points) more likely to participate in the labor force than women whose children are in the same age range but whose mother is not yet pension eligible. The same difference increases to 25% (14.8 percentage points) for women whose children are under 6, a substantially larger effect than the 21 See, for example, OECD (2001) and Bloemen et al (2010). reduced form effect reported in AFVF (2015) in the sample of women with young children.…”