We measure the impact of measurement error in labor-supply elasticities estimated over recalled usual work hours, as is ubiquitous in the literature. Employing hours of work in diaries collected by the American Time Use Survey, 2003-12, along with the same respondents' recalled usual hours, we...

Retirement ages among older Americans have only recently begun to increase after a precipitous fifty-year decline. Early retirement may result from incentives provided by retirement systems; but it may also result from the rigidities imposed by market work schedules. Using the American Time Use...

Using time-diary data from four countries we show that the unemployed spend most of the time not working for pay in additional leisure and personal maintenance, not in increased household production. There is no relation between unemployment duration and the split of time between household...

Evidence from the American Time Use Survey 2003-12 suggests the existence of small but statistically significant racial/ethnic differences in time spent not working at the workplace. Minorities, especially men, spend a greater fraction of their workdays not working than do white non-Hispanics....

American workweeks are long compared to other rich countries'. Much less well-known is that Americans are more likely to work at night and on weekends. We examine the relationship between these two phenomena using the American Time Use Survey and time-diary data from 5 other countries. Adjusting...

Market productivity is often greater, and leisure and other household activities more enjoyable, when people perform them simultaneously. Beyond pointing out the positive externalities of synchronicity, economists have not attempted to identify exogenous causes that affect timing. We develop a...

Eating requires the food materials that make up meals and also time devoted to buying food, preparing meals and eating them, and cleaning up afterwards. Using time-diary and expenditure data for the U.S. for 1985 and 2003, I examine how income and time prices affect time and goods inputs into...

Economists have devoted substantial attention to firms' supply of variety, but little to consumers' demand for variety. Employing the framework of home production, we trace differences in demand to differences in the opportunity costs of activities, which are associated with investments in human...

Using time-diary data from 25 countries, we demonstrate that there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day - the sum of work for pay and work at home. In rich northern countries on four continents there is no difference -...

The American Time Use Survey 2003-15, the French Enquête Emploi du Temps, 2009-10, and the German Zeitverwendungserhebung, 2012-13, have sufficient observations to allow examining the theory of household production in much more detail than ever before. We identify income effects on time use by...