Working for the Weekend: A Time Allocation Model for Student Workers

An important area of consumer choice is time allocation and its role in dictating behavior. For the typical student worker, the time allocation decision involves three primary activities: paid employment, academic pursuits, and leisure pursuits. Exogenous factors such as the wage rate, price of consumption, rate of effective studying, desired academic grade, and total time available influence an individual’s choice of time to spend on work, study, and leisure. The effects of these exogenous factors reveal a bifurcation in the student worker’s time allocation decision: a labor-leisure tradeoff versus academics. The time allocation model developed here derives these effects for the hybrid case of the student worker.