Time Use During the Great Recession

Abstract

Using data from the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2010, we document that home production absorbs roughly 30 percent of foregone market work hours at business cycle frequencies. Leisure absorbs roughly 50 percent of foregone market work hours, with sleeping and television watching accounting for most of this increase. We document significant increases in time spent on shopping, child care, education, and health. Job search absorbs between 2 and 6 percent of foregone market work hours. We discuss the implications of our results for business cycle models with home production and non-separable preferences.JEL-Codes: D13, E32, J22.

The Labor Wedge: MRS vs. MPN

“…For the United States, their hours per employee data comes from the 7 I define leisure as discretionary time less than aggregate hours worked, l t = T − n t . Using data from the American Time Use Survey between 2003, Aguiar, Hurst, and Karabarbounis (2013 show that sleeping, eating, and personal care are the three most acyclical major time uses. These "non-discretionary" time uses account for 53.5 percent of time not spent working for the average person.…”

Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Time Use of Married and Cohabiting Parents during the Great Recession

“…In particular, women and men reallocated 50 percent of their foregone market work hours during the recession to leisure activities, 30 percent to unpaid housework, and 5 percent to child caregiving. However, they also find that men's paid work hours declined by 11 percent, while women experienced a less than 1 percent (0.32 percent) decline in their unpaid work hours (Aguiar, Hurst, andKarabarbounis 2013: 1671). 4 The share of families where only the father was employed increased by 4.3 percentage points; the percentage of families where only the mother was employed increased by 1.5 percentage points (Glynn 2014: 9).…”

“…4 Hispanic mothers make up 26.4 percent of married mothers with zero earnings, while AfricanAmerican mothers make up 6 percent, reflecting the historically high labor force participation rates among African-American women and perhaps also lower average earnings for Hispanic women compared to African-American women, which discourages their entry into the labor force, especially within the US policy context where only a few policies address work-family challenges (Glynn 2014). 3 Using data from 2003-10 ATUS for women and men, Aguiar, Hurst, and, Karabarbounis (2013) find that women and men reallocate their foregone paid work hours to leisure activities and unpaid work in a similar manner. In particular, women and men reallocated 50 percent of their foregone market work hours during the recession to leisure activities, 30 percent to unpaid housework, and 5 percent to child caregiving.…”

“…We explore the relationships between these variables and the within-state variation in unemployment rates relative to other states, which we use as a proxy for the businesscycle effect. Our methodology is similar to Aguiar, Hurst, and Karabarbounis (2013) and Morrill and Pabilonia (2015), who use state unemployment rates as a proxy for macroeconomic conditions rather than individual-level data on employment status in order to estimate the effects of the recession.…”

“…The decline in paid work hours due to job loss or underemployment during the recession allowed for time to be spent on Aguiar, Hurst, and Karabarbounis (2013) explore how the "surplus time" in US labor markets during the recession was reallocated across unpaid work, leisure and personal care activities, and other categories of time use, and found that both women and men allocated more than half of their foregone paid work hours to leisure activities, and about onethird to unpaid housework and care work activities. For married or cohabiting opposite-sex parents in the US, Berik and Kongar (2013) examined the impact of the recession on gender differences in time use over the 2003-10 period through a gender lens and found evidence of an increase in mothers' paid work burden during the recession, while fathers increased the time they spent on child-caregiving activities.…”