Whose money, whose time? A nonparametric approach to modeling time spent on housework in the United States

This paper argues that earlier quantitative research on the relationship between heterosexual partners' earnings and time spent on housework has two basic flaws: First, it has focused on the effects of women's shares of couples' total earnings on housework, not considering the simpler possibility of an association between women's absolute earnings and housework. Second, it tends to draw uniform inferences across the range of data, including regions where the data are sparse. This paper adopts a flexible, nonparametric approach to examine this relationship within a US context, while not imposing the polynomial specifications on data that characterize the two dominant models. The results provide support for an alternative model that emphasizes the importance of partners' own earnings for their housework, especially in the case of women. Women's earnings are negatively associated with their housework hours, independent of their partners' earnings and their shares of couples' total earnings.