Husbands’ housework time: does wives’ paid employment make a difference?

In this paper, we investigate the effect of a woman’s decision to enter paid employment on her husband’s contribution to domestic work. To explore this issue, we analyze cross-sectional data on Spanish couples. Our results suggest that female decision to participate in the labor market increases husbands’housework time. However, these estimates may be subject to an omitted variable bias due to both the joint nature of time allocation decisions within the household and the correlation between unobservables. Once we take into account this endogeneity problem, we find a larger impact of the wife’s labor status.