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We estimate the impacts of temperature on time allocation by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in temperature over time within counties. Temperature increases at the higher end of the distribution reduce hours worked in industries with high exposure to climate and reduce time allocated to outdoor leisure for the nonemployed, with this time reallocated to indoor leisure. At the lower end of the distribution, time allocated to labor is nonresponsive to temperature increases, but outdoor leisure increases while indoor leisure decreases as temperature warms. We also find suggestive evidence of short-run adaptation to higher temperatures through temporal substitutions and acclimatization.

We study choices of households deciding on consumption and allocation of spouses’ time to work, leisure, and child care. With uncertainty, the allocation of goods and time over the life cycle also serves the purpose of smoothing marginal utility in response to shocks. Combining data on consumption, wages, hours of work, and time spent with children, we compute the sensitivity of consumption and time allocation to transitory and permanent wage shocks. We find that family labor supply responses depend on three counteracting forces: complementarity of leisure time, substitutability of time in the production of child services, and added worker effects.

An empirical approach to optimal income taxation design is developed within an equilibrium collective marriage market model with imperfectly transferable utility. Taxes distort time allocation decisions, as well as marriage market outcomes, and the within household decision process. Using data from the American Community Survey and American Time Use Survey, we structurally estimate our model and explore empirical design problems. We allow taxes to depend upon marital status, with the form of tax jointness for married couples unrestricted. We find that the optimal tax system for married couples is characterized by negative jointness, although the welfare gains from jointness are modest. These welfare gains are then shown to be increasing in the gender wage gap, with taxes here, as in the case of gender based taxation, providing an instrument to address within household inequality.

The growth in labour market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about its implications for child cognitive development. We estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard model of household behaviour. The household makes labour supply decisions and provides time and money inputs into the child quality production process during the development period. Our empirical results indicate that both parents' time inputs are important for the cognitive development of their children, particularly when the child is young. Money expenditures are less productive in terms of producing child quality. Comparative statics exercises demonstrate that cash transfers to households with children have small impacts on child quality due to the relatively low impact of money investments on child outcomes and the fact that a significant fraction of the transfer is spent on other household consumption and the leisure of the parents.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the time-allocation decisions of individuals who work from home (i.e. teleworkers), and compare them with their commuter counterparts. Design/methodology/approach Using data from the American Time Use Survey for the years 2003–2015, the authors analyze the time spent working, and the timing of work, of both commuters and teleworkers. Findings Results show that teleworkers devote 40 percent less time to market work activities than do commuters, and less than 60 percent of teleworkers work at “regular hours,” vs around 80 percent of their commuter counterparts. Using information from the Well-being Module for the years 2012 and 2013, the authors find that male teleworkers experience lower levels of negative feelings while working than do commuters. Originality/value This paper addresses the timing of work of workers working from home; and the instant well-being experienced, exploiting information at diary level.

A single worker allocates her time among different projects which are progressively assigned. When the worker works on too many projects at the same time, the output rate decreases and completion time increases according to a law which we derive. We call this phenomenon \"task juggling\" and argue that it is pervasive in the workplace. We show that task juggling is a strategic substitute of worker effort. We then present a model where task juggling is the result of lobbying by clients, or coworkers, each seeking to get the worker to apply effort to his project ahead of the others'.

In recent decades, American workers have faced a rising college premium, a narrowing gender gap, and increasing wage volatility. This paper explores the quantitative and welfare implications of these changes. The framework is an incomplete-markets life cycle model in which individuals choose education, intrafamily time allocation, and savings. Given the observed history of the U.S. wage structure, the model replicates key trends in cross-sectional inequality in hours worked, earnings, and consumption. Recent cohorts enjoy welfare gains, on average, as higher relative wages for college graduates and for women translate into higher educational attainment and a more even division of labor within the household.

Delayed marriage and childbearing, more births outside marriage, the increase in women's labor force participation, and the aging of the population have altered family life and created new challenges for those with caregiving demands. U.S. mothers have shed hours of housework but not the hours they devote to childrearing. Fathers have increased the time they spend on childcare. Intensive childrearing practices combine with more dual-earning and single parenting to increase the time demands on parents. Mothers continue to scale back paid work to meet childrearing demands. They also give up leisure time and report that they \"are always rushed\" and are \"multitasking most of the time.\" Time-stretched working couples reduce the time they spend with each other. A large percentage of both husbands and wives also report they have \"too little time\" for themselves. Delayed childbearing and the aging population also increase the likelihood that both (adult) children and elderly parents need support and care from workers later in life.

Among the extraordinary shocks to household life caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was the sudden shift to distance learning in K-12 schools. Gone were Monday through Friday routines of school day, extracurricular activities, and evening homework; schools scrambled to launch alternative delivery systems, expecting parents to step in and spend significant amounts of time helping children continue to learn. This study examines the sudden shift to distance learning using data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. Conducted weekly from April through July 2020, the survey tracked COVID-related shocks to employment, health, food and housing security, and education in the U.S. population. We use Pulse data on 200,000 households with K-12 children to examine how school systems shifted, how parents stepped up and spent time helping children learn, how parental time inputs varied with parent education, and how education changes intersected with other pandemic shocks, including job loss and food insecurity. We find that parents and children spent significantly more time in learning activities when their schools provided diversified educational inputs, especially live contact time with teachers; live contact hours also facilitated children learning on their own. Given the type of alternative schooling, less educated parents spent no less time helping children than better educated parents, although they faced significantly more problems with computer and internet access. Thus, parents generally tried to help children continue learning in the pandemic, albeit with potentially wide variation in the resources they could supply to mitigate the drop in learning.

In this paper, we study the impact of risk on time allocation decisions between occupations by modeling a hybrid entrepreneur who must decide how to allocate time between paid employment (labor) and working on a venture (entrepreneurship). We argue that hybrid entrepreneurs self-insure in response to income risk by managing the time they allocate between the two occupations. We provide the conditions under which an uninsurable risk (in paid employment or the entrepreneurial sector) has an unambiguous precautionary effect on the optimal time allocated to each occupation, and these conditions are based on the strengths of risk aversion and downside risk aversion. We focus on three cases: when risk affects only the entrepreneurial sector, which is the classical case studied in the occupational choice literature; when risk affects only the paid employment sector; and finally, when risk affects both sectors, as we experienced during the recent pandemic.Plain English SummaryHybrid entrepreneurs allocate their time between paid work (labor) and working on a venture. Traditionally, it is thought that the paid job sector is stable over time, and so all risks are concentrated in the entrepreneurial sector. However, the disruption of COVID-19 affected a wide variety of productive activity, and the labor market in particular became extremely turbulent for many people. As a result, it is vital to understand how risk influences how hybrid entrepreneurs allocate their time between different occupations using an optimization technique that considers the risk connected with each activity as a way to understand precautionary behavior. The method utilized in this study has the primary advantage of permitting the investigation of simultaneous risks, which can be tested in the future through experimentation. This link brings up a plethora of possibilities for exploration in the study of entrepreneurship activities utilizing modern decision theory methods.