Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades / Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Aguiar, Mark.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Hurst, Erik.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w12082.

NBER working paper series no. w12082

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Measuring Trends in Leisure

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2006.

Summary:

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we show that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. Alternatively, the "consumption equivalent" of the increase in leisure is valued at 8 to 9 percent of total 2003 U.S. consumption expenditures. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing "inequality" in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2006.