Time-use researchers are typically interested in the time use of individuals, but time use data are samples of person-days. Given day-to-day variation in how people spend their time, this distinction is analytically important. We examine the conditions necessary to make inferences about the time...

Hours worked is an important economic indicator. In addition to being a measure of labor utilization, average weekly hours are inputs into measures of productivity and hourly wages, which are two key economic indicators. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ two hours series tell very...

Although income inequality has been studied extensively, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of household production. Economic theory predicts that households with less money income will produce more goods at home. Thus extended income, which includes the value of household...

It has been argued that one of the functions of fringe benefits is to reduce turnover. However, due to a lack of data, the effect on quits of the marginal dollar of benefits relative to the marginal dollar of wages is an under-researched topic. This paper uses the benefit incidence data in the...

This paper analyzes the relationship between wages and productivity during the early years of an employment relationship. Data from the Employment Opportunity Pilot Project show that worker productivity grows substantially during the first two years on the job, with most of the growth in...

School-age children need 10-11 hours of sleep per night. It has been well-documented that lack of sleep leads to diminished cognitive performance and that people who sleep less are more likely to be overweight or obese. I use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to examine two factors...

We examine monthly variation in weekly work hours using data for 2003-10 from the Current Population Survey (CPS) on hours/worker, from the Current Employment Survey (CES) on hours/job, and from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) on both. The ATUS data minimize recall difficulties and constrain...

Time-use surveys collect very detailed information about individuals’ activities over a short period of time, typically one day. As a result, a large fraction of observations have values of zero for the time spent in many activities, even for individuals who do the activity on a regular basis....

Although male nonworkers have become a larger fraction of the population since the late 1960s, labor economists know very little about them. Using data from several sources--the March CPS, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and the 1992-94 University of Maryland Time Diary Study--this...

I use data from the American Time Use Survey to examine how maternal employment affects when during the day that mothers of pre-school-age children spend doing enriching childcare and whether they adjust their schedules to spend time with their children at more desirable times of day. I find...