A Century of Work and Leisure

1
A Century of Work and Leisure

• by
• Valerie A. Rameyand
• Neville Francis

2
Has Leisure Increased Over the Last Century?

• Keynes (1930)
• Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
• Lebergott (1993), Greenwood Vandebroucke
  (2005) leisure has increased dramatically over
  the last century
• Prescott (1986) and DGE models
• No secular trends in leisure

3
Annual Hours Worked Per Worker in the
U.S. (Maddisons data)
4
Annual Hours Worked in Business (Divided by
Civilian Non-Institutional Population Ages 16)
5
New Measures of Leisure Per Capita

• New measure of per capita
• Entire population
• Comprehensive measure of non-leisure time
• - Work-for-pay hours
• - School hours
• - Home production hours

6
How Should We Measure Per Capita?
7
Standard Measure of Per Capita

• Civilian non-institutional population
• total non-institutional
  population ages 16 and over
• armed forces.
• Justification?
• Notion of available workforce

8
Why Not Use Total Population?
Theoretical Basis Standard model with explicit
population growth Choose consumption ct and
leisure lt to maximize
where Nt is total population
Empirical Basis The consumption of children is
counted in c. Why dont we count their leisure
in l?
9
Importance of Accounting for Children

• Consider a model with perfect substitutability of
  consumption and leisure of adults and children in
  household utility.
• Let
• c1 per capita consumption by children,
  c2 per capita consumption by adults
• h1 per capita hours worked by children,
  h2 per capita hours worked by adults
• ? fraction of population that is children
• The representative household maximizes
• subject to
• and h1, h2, c1, c2 ? 0.
• If w1 lt w2, then it is optimal to set h1 0 and
  
• Increase in the fraction of children leads to an
  increase in h2, hours per capita of adults.
• Thus, adult time use is affected by the presence
  of dependents with lower productivity.

10
Population Ages 0-15 as a Fraction of Total
Population

11
Population Ages 65 as a Fraction of Total
Population
12
Comprehensive Measures ofNon-Leisure Time

• Work for pay (including government)
• Commuting time
• School Hours
• Home Production

13
What is Leisure?

• Hawrylshyn (1971) distinguishes leisure from
  household work by defining household work
  activities as those economic services produced
  in the household and outside the market, but
  which could be produced by a third person hired
  on the market without changing the utility to
  members of the household.

14
Ratings of Activity Enjoyment 1985 (From
Robinson and Godbey Appendix O)
15
Accounting for Hours Worked for Pay
The standard RBC measure excludes hours worked in
government (civilian and military). Is that
important for trends?
16
Government Hours as a Fraction of Total Work
Hours

17
Measuring Total Hours

• Includes private hours (establishment,
  self-employed, unpaid family workers) plus
  government hours
• Use Kendrick data for early period
• Use BLS private hours index upweighted by BEA
  full-time equivalent employment numbers

18
New Estimates of Annual Market Hours Per Worker
19
Commuting Time

• Time diary estimates from 1965 2003 suggest
  commute times are a relatively constant 10 of
  hours worked.
• Scant evidence early in the century
• - Average commute distances for shorter
• urban workers, farmers
• - But modes of urban transportation were slower
• - Hours per worker, days per week
• Rodrigue (2004) argues time spent commuting for
  urban workers was relatively constant over 20th
  Century
• We assume commute time is 10 of hours worked for
  entire century

20
Accounting for Hours Spent in School
21
School Enrollment Rates
22
Estimating School Hours

• Annual school hours
• (enrollment in grades K 8 ) (avg. days
  attended by enrollee) 5.5 hours
• (enrollment in grades 9 - 12 ) (avg. days
  attended by enrollee) 7 hours
• (enrollment in college) (fraction
  full-time)
• 0.3 (fraction part-time) 165 days 8
  hours

23
Annual Per Capita Hours Spent on School for Ages
5-22
24
Hours Spent in School as a Fraction of Total
Market Work

25
Accounting for Hours Spent in Home Production
26
Conventional Wisdom

• The diffusion of household utilities and
  appliances dramatically reduced the hours spent
  in household chores.

27
Estimating Home Production Hours

• We use data from time diaries when possible,
  since they are considered the most reliable
  measure of both market work and home production
  hours
• Strategy
• gather time diary estimates by sex-age-employment
  status cells
• interpolate between years for each cell
• weight cell by fraction of population in that
  cell.

28
Estimates of Hours of Housework per Week by
Nonemployed Women Ages 18-64
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Are the Early Studies Representative?

• Samples were not nationally representative
• Urban samples tended to have above average income
• But most samples were rural, which had less
  access to electricity, market goods, etc.
• Evidence suggests that poor urban households did
  not do more housework being poor meant being
  dirty, relied on bakery bread.
• Bryant (1996) adjusts for non-representativeness.
  Our estimates are consistent with his.

30
Why Didnt the Diffusion of AppliancesReduce
Housework?

• Appliances replaced low-wage immigrant labor
• Decline in maiden aunts
• of nonemployed women living in others house
  with no children of own 18 in 1900, 7.6 in
  1960.
• Cross-section and time series studies on
  appliances more appliances lead to more
  household production output
• Betty Friedan (1963) The Feminine Mystique
• Mokyr (2000) Revolution in sanitation, germ
  theory of disease and nutrition theory increased
  demand for cleanliness just as appliances were
  diffusing

31
Estimates of Housework by Employment Sex
Category (ages 18-64)
32
Childrens Home Production

• Estimates from the 1920s are similar to those
  from the 1980s
• Ages 5-14 3 hours a week
• Ages 15-17 5 hours a week

33
Average Weekly Hours of Housework of Adults
34
Hours Per Capita in Various Activities
35
Per Capita Market-Oriented Hours
36
Measuring Leisure

• Time endowment is 24 hours per day, 365 days per
  year
• Most personal care time ranks high on enjoyment
  index (sleeping, eating), so we do not subtract
  it from leisure
• Personal care time is relatively constant at 75
  hours per week

37
Annual Leisure Hours Per Capita
38
Conclusions

• New measures suggest leisure per capita now is
  about equal to leisure per capita in 1900
• Our results are different from the standard ones
  because we track the leisure of the entire
  population and we dont count schooling as
  leisure.
• Keynes prediction has not come true yet for the US