Health,time allocation and work: empirical evidence from Turkey

This article investigates the relationship between health status and time allocation decisions of individuals. Although many studies address impacts of health on labour supply, few studies explore associations of health status with non-market work activities. Using a nationally representative sample from a recent Turkish Time Use Survey, this article employs Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) framework to estimate multiple equations of various time use categories. Consistent with literature, empirical results indicate that higher levels of self-reported health status (SRHS) are associated with more time spent in market work. However, better health level is negatively correlated with time spent in leisure and sleep. There is mixed evidence between self-reported health status (SRHS) and time spent on non-market work. There is a negative weak association between health and time devoted to personal care. Finally, demographics such as gender, age, education and marital status display correlations with time allocation of Turkish individuals.     

Legal exclusions,private wealth and livelihoods: An analysis of work time allocation in protected areas

Do exclusionary forest access regimes have an unequal impact on livelihood activities? This paper analyzes primary data on time allocation to livelihood activities by forest communities in the Indian Himalayas to investigate this question. Estimation results are consistent with the hypothesis that forest access regimes affect both forest extraction behavior and other livelihood strategies. Residents of sanctuary forests, experiencing higher restrictions on forest use, decrease the proportion of time allocated to forest extraction and livestock activities, but compensate by increasing their time allocation to agriculture in comparison to residents of state-controlled protected forests. However, wealthy residents of the wildlife sanctuary expend a higher proportion of their time in managing livestock and extracting forest resources in comparison to its less affluent residents. Thus wealth enables circumvention of access restrictions despite legalization of exclusion. Findings of this study have implications for design of biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration policies.     

Externalities,communication and the allocation of decision rights

The assignment of authority entitles the decision maker to undertake decisions that impose externalities on the payoffs of other members of the organization. This paper studies how the optimal allocation of decision rights depends on the preferences of the organization’s members. It adopts a mechanism-design approach to show how the communication of private information affects the efficient allocation of authority. An extension to multiple decision areas shows that decentralized control rights may enhance organizational efficiency unless there exist strong complementarities between different decisions.     

AIDS treatment and intrahousehold resource allocation: Children's nutrition and schooling in Kenya

The provision of antiretroviral medications is a central component of the response to HIV/AIDS and consumes substantial public resources from around the world, but little is known about this intervention's impact on the welfare of children in treated persons' households. Using longitudinal survey data from Kenya, we examine the relationship between the provision of treatment to adults and the schooling and nutrition outcomes of children in their households. Weekly hours of school attendance increase by over 20% within 6 months after treatment is initiated for the adult patient. We find some weak evidence that young children's short-term nutritional status also improves. These results suggest how intrahousehold allocations of time and resources may be altered in response to health improvements of adults.     

Working time, employment, and work sharing: Evidence from Sweden

We study three questions which are important for work sharing to increase employment. First, is there a negative long-run relation between working time and employment? Second, are hours per worker exogenous with respect to wages and employment? Third, can policy makers influence actual hours per worker? We formulate a theoretical model for employment, hours per worker, production, and real wages. A VAR model with cointegrating constraints is estimated by maximum likelihood using Swedish private sector data 1970:1–1990:4. We find (i) no long-run relation between hours per worker and employment, (ii) that hours per worker are endogenous with respect to the estimation of long-run parameters, and (iii) that legislated working time and hours per worker are related to each other in the long run. First version received: September 1997/final version accepted: June 1999     

Time-saving innovations, time allocation, and energy use: Evidence from Canadian households

Time and energy are major inputs into the production of household goods and services. As a result, the market penetration of time-saving technologies for general household use is expected to affect both a household's (i) allocation of time across home production and leisure activities; and (ii) energy use. For example, with a household's adoption of a microwave or a dishwasher, cooking food and washing dishes will require less time, and therefore in-home meal preparation may increase. Households with microwaves or dishwashers may also opt to spend more time undertaking other production activities, inside or outside the home, or engage in more leisure (watching TV, reading, exercising). To the extent that time is reallocated from less to more energy-intensive activities in the home, residential energy use will increase as households adopt appliances that embody time-saving technology. Furthermore, an adoption of time-saving technologies for basic household chores, such as meal preparation and laundry, can impact energy use due to the fact that many time-saving technologies are more energy intensive than alternative technologies that require larger time commitments. In this paper, we use the Canadian Survey of Household Energy Use data from 2003 to examine the extent to which ownership of products that embody time-saving innovations affects time allocation and energy use at the household level.     

The intertemporal allocation of consumption,time preference,and life-history strategies

This paper studies the intertemporal allocation of consumption and time preference in both biological and economic framework. By incorporating intergenerational transfers to examine human life-history strategies, this study demonstrates that time discounting and mortality mirror the age-variation in the value of survival, which in turn depends on future reproduction and productive surplus. Consistent with empirical findings, the results suggest that our biologically endowed rate of time preference is positive, and is lowest in early adulthood, but increases thereafter. The results also offers a biological explanation for intertemporal loss aversion, indicating that time preference is higher when exchange transactions involve a reduction in current consumption than when they involve an increase in current consumption. In a broader perspective, this paper looks into the biological foundation of preferences and motivation. Establishing the foundation of preferences with biological models and incorporating the results into economic models enrich the understanding of our decision-making mechanism and behavior.     

Trends in time allocation: A cross-country analysis

Using detailed time-use data for seven industrialized countries from the 1970s until today we document general decreases in men's market work coupled with increases in men's unpaid work and child care, and increases in women's paid work and child care coupled with decreases in unpaid work. We also find almost universal increases in the time devoted to watching television over this period, and uncover a widespread increase in leisure inequality in favor of lower educated adults. Trends in leisure inequality mirror the general increase in income and earnings inequality experienced in most countries over this period, especially after the mid-1980s. All these findings are consistent with previous results for the US. However, in contrast to the increases in leisure found for the US, we fail to find common trends in leisure time across countries over the period analyzed.     

Schooling,wages and profits: Negative pecuniary externalities from schooling and their consequences for schooling investments

This paper tests the hypothesis that the schooling of the poor reduces profits for landowners, and that such negative pecuniary externalities in turn adversely affect schooling investments made by local governments. A theoretical model of occupational choice in the presence of credit and labor market constraints, combined with existing political economy models of the delivery of local public goods delivers such a result. This hypothesis is tested using household data from India. The empirical analysis shows that profits are reduced by the schooling of the poor and that this is primarily because of the effect of schooling on wages. It also shows that the negative effect of wages on profits reduces government provided schooling inputs.     

Population ageing,time allocation and human capital: A general equilibrium analysis for Canada

This study explores the long-term impact of population ageing on labour supply and human capital investment in Canada, as well as the induced effects on productive capacity. The analysis is conducted with a dynamic computable overlapping generations model where in the spirit of Becker [Becker, Gary (1965), A theory of the allocation of time, The Economic Journal, Vol. 75, pp. 493–517.] and Heckman [Heckman, James (1976), A life-cycle model of earnings, learning and consumption, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84, pp. 511–544], leisure has a quality-time feature and labour supply and human capital investment decisions are endogenous. The role of human capital in the growth process is based on the framework used by Mankiw et al. [Mankiw, N. Gregory, Romer, David and Weil, David N. (1992), A contribution to the empirics of economic growth, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 107, no. 2, pp. 407–437]. The paper indicates that population ageing creates more opportunities for young individuals to invest in human capital and supply more skilled labour at middle age. Consequently, the reduction in labour supply of young adults initially lowers productive capacity and exacerbates the economic costs of population ageing. However, current and future middle-age cohorts are more skilled and work more, which eventually raises productive capacity and significantly lowers the cost of population ageing. Finally, these results suggest that the recent increase in the participation rate of older workers might be the beginning of a new trend that will amplify over the next decades.     

Wives' time allocation and intrahousehold power: evidence from the Philippines

Utilizing a rich survey data collected in the Southern part of the Philippines, this paper examines the time allocation of wives within the collective household framework by investigating not only the role of socioeconomic factors but also the influence of various intrahousehold power indicators. Analysis of autonomy and finality of intrahousehold decisions discloses that decisions are not unilaterally decided by a single household member, a result which confirms the prediction of collective household framework. Adopting a simple test procedure, this paper also examines which of the competing household models, collective or unitary, best describes these Philippine time-use data. Testing results lend support to the validity of the collective household framework.     

Total work time in Spain: evidence from time diary data

Using detailed time-use data from 2002–03 and 2009–10 for Spain, we analyse changes in the time-allocation decisions of the Spanish population, with a focus on the time devoted to total work. Consistent with prior literature, we document that the concept of ‘iso-work’ (e.g. the time devoted to total work by gender is equal) does not hold in societies with stringent gender roles, such as Spain. Women devote more time to total work than men, and this difference has increased throughout the period studied by 2 hours per week. The relative increase in total work for women compared to men can be explained by a relative increase in market work of 8 hours per week, coupled with a relative decrease in nonmarket work of 6 hours per week, which have led Spanish women to devote, relatively, 2 fewer hours to leisure per week in 2009–10, compared to 2002–03. We propose social norms as a potential explanation of these empirical findings. By uncovering how individuals allocate their time inside and outside the market over a period of time, our results may improve our understanding of the dynamics of economic change and welfare.     

Examining crop price effects on production decision and resource allocation: an ex-ante approach

This article examines the output price effects on the US crop production, employing an ex-ante approach to the differential systems of input demand and output supply. The estimation results of the differential input demand show that the expansion of crop production leads to an increase in acreage (i.e. extensive margin) and a proportional rise in input usage improving yield per acre (i.e. intensive margin). The substitutable relationship between fertilizer and land supports that crop producers have an option to choose either intensive or extensive margin in response to changes in their relative prices. In addition, the estimation results of the differential output supply highlight that the composition of crop supply can be altered by changes in ex-ante crop prices. The estimation results suggest that crop producers substitute corn supply for the supply of cotton, wheat and soybeans or vice versa. Based on the estimated elasticities, the decompositions of profit-maximizing input demand are conducted, which reveals that a change in ex-ante crop prices is associated closely with resource reallocation.     

International migration,remittances, and schooling: evidence from El Salvador

We examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households' schooling decisions using data for El Salvador. Following the massive war-related emigration of the 1980s, remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990s. We use the Cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance. Measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling—remittances—, we find that remittances have a large, significant effect on school retention. We estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small, though significant, impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas, remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school. In urban areas, the effect of remittances is, at its smallest, 10 times the size of the effect of other income. In rural areas, the effect of remittances is about 2.6 times that of other income. Our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance, particularly in poor areas, may have a large impact on school attendance and retention, even if parents have low levels of schooling.     

A note on the allocation of time

A multi-commodity model in which time as well as nominal income is necessary in the process of consumption is analyzed. Duality theory is used to provide a counter example to the ‘Linder Theorem’ that a rise in real wages will decrease consumption of some good if it is more time intensive than the weighted average of the time intensity of all other commodities.     

Substitution in consumption: An application to the allocation of time

In this article, we have constructed a model, where the commodity-price effect and the good- price effect in a Becker-Lancaster model are related, and the relevance of factor substitution in consumption technology can be verified. A first application is made to the allocation of time for Belgian data.     

Remittances, schooling, and child labor in Mexico

This paper studies the effects of remittances from the U.S. on child labor and school attendance in recipient Mexican households. We identify these effects using the impact of the 2008-2009 U.S. recession on remittance receipts. The methodology employed is a differences-in-differences strategy that compares households that were remittance recipients before the crisis with never-recipient households. To avoid possible selection problems, we instrument for membership in the remittance recipient group. We find that the negative shock on remittance receipts caused a significant increase in child labor and a significant reduction of school attendance.     

Directly unproductive schooling: How country characteristics affect the impact of schooling on growth

The rapid rise in schooling in developing countries in recent decades has been dramatic. However, many cross-country regression analyses of the impact of schooling on economic growth find low and insignificant coefficients. This empirical ‘puzzle’ contrasts with theoretical arguments that schooling, through raising human capital, should raise income levels. This paper argues that poor results are to be expected when regression samples include countries that vary greatly in their ability to use schooling productively. Data on corruption, the black market premium on foreign exchange and the extent of the brain drain for developing countries are used as indicators of an economy's productive use of schooling. Regression analysis shows that the impact of schooling on economic growth is substantially higher in countries that are adjudged to use schooling productively.