Twenty-Five Hours in a Day: On Job Flexibility and the Intrahousehold Allocation of Time and Money

Flexible work schedules and telecommuting may help to improve the combination of work and family. An open question is whether job flexibility can increase the well-being of the children, which depends on parental time spent on childcare. We propose a rich collective model describing the intrahousehold allocation of time and money treating children's well-being as a domestically produced good. Job flexibility may influence this domestic production process as a production shifter, capturing that flexible jobs can ease constraints on childcare time. We apply our model to a unique sample of Dutch couples with children and find that job flexibility significantly impacts the production of children's well-being. While the results indicate that more job flexibility for fathers may help parents to balance work and family, they imply that more job flexibility for mothers may not allow parents to achieve the same. The overall implications for children's well-being appear negative, albeit limited.