A household production model of paid labor, household work and child care

In this paper we use data on time allocation of women to estimate the value of market and non-market work. Four time use categories are distinguished: paid work, houshold work, care for children, and leisure. The estimation results show that the value of non-market production (household production and child care) is substantial and exceeds that of market production (paid work).     

Supplier density and at-home care use in Japan: Evidence from a micro-level survey on long-term care receivers

Following the introduction of the long-term care insurance scheme and deregulation of the market for at-home care services, Japan experienced a substantial increase in expenditure on care for the elderly. Using household-level survey data, we empirically examine whether the increase in care expenditure is associated with supplier density springing from the rise in the number of care providers following deregulation. We provide weak evidence that supplier density in the at-home care market is positively correlated with probability to use care or expenditure on care. Moreover, we find no link between the share of for-profit providers and the demand for at-home care services.     

Gender, Time Use, and Public Policy over the Life Cycle

In this paper we compare gender differences in the allocationof time to market work, domestic work, child care, and leisureover the life cycle. Time-use profiles for these activity categoriesare constructed on survey data for three countries: Australia,the UK, and Germany. We discuss the extent to which gender differencesand life-cycle variation in time use can be explained by publicpolicy, focusing on the tax treatment of the female partnerand on access to high-quality, affordable child care. Profilesof time use, earnings, and taxes are compared over the lifecycle defined on age as well as on phases that represent thekey transitions in the life cycle of a typical household. Ourcontention is that, given the decision to have children, life-cycletime use and consumption decisions of households are determinedby them and by public policy. Before children arrive, the adultmembers of the household have high labour supplies and plentyof leisure. The presence of pre-school children, in combinationwith the tax treatment of the second earner's income and thecost of bought-in child care, dramatically change the patternof time use, leading to large falls in female labour supply.We also highlight the fact that, in the three countries we study,female labour supply exhibits a very high degree of heterogeneityafter the arrival of children, and we show that this has importantimplications for public policy. Footnotes ¹ E-mail addresses: pfapps{at}law.usyd.edu.au; ray.rees{at}lrz.uni-muenchen.de     

FinTech adoption and the effects of economic uncertainty on household consumption

This paper examines how the adoption of FinTech affects household consumption in the presence of economic uncertainty. We use regional-level FinTech adoption and economic uncertainty measurement, along with representative household-level consumption data, to investigate this issue. Our empirical analysis shows that while high levels of economic uncertainty lead to a shift in household consumption from services to non-durable goods, widespread adoption of FinTech overcomes this negative effect and prevents the reduction in service spending. We use the distance of a household from Hangzhou and the economic uncertainty in the United States as proxies for exogenous variation in FinTech adoption and economic uncertainty in China, respectively, and find similar results. Focusing on the transmission channel, we find that FinTech helps alleviate credit constraints, contributes to entrepreneurship and employment opportunities, and thus mitigates the negative impact of economic uncertainty on household consumption.     

The Impact of Work-Life Balance Policies on the Time Allocation and Fertility Preference of Japanese Women

We analyse the impact of work-life balance policies enacted by the government of Japan on the share of time allocated by Japanese women to paid employment, home production and leisure on a typical working day. Using panel data and employing fixed effects to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that these policies have had some success in increasing married women’s share of time spent in paid employment. However, the increase in the share of time spent in paid employment is not largely compensated by cutting down the share of time spent in home production. This necessitates the need to cut down the share of time spent for leisure, implying a “double burden” of work for women. Further, work-life balance policies in married men’s firms do not appear to significantly influence their time allocation between various activities on a typical working day. We find that although work-life balance policies do not appear to influence the desirability of having a child for all women, they help women with children younger than six years raise the share of time spent in paid employment by largely cutting down their time allocation to home production.     

The urbanization-household gender inequality nexus: Evidence from time allocation in China

Urbanization and accompanying socio-economic change, alter intra-household behaviours including paid and unpaid work patterns. China's rapid urbanization raises important questions about the changing nature of gender asymmetries in the household division of labour. Using 24-hour time module data from the China Family Panel Studies, we investigate time allocation of females and males in matched-couples in urban, rural-urban migrant, and rural households. Our model explicitly incorporates the impact of care of young children on time-use. Distinguishing between care and other housework, overall, we find while traditional gendered time-use patterns persist among rural households, urbanization and migration reduces gender differentials in unpaid work. Both urban and migrant fathers engage in more care work than their rural counterparts. We shed new light on the configurations of paid and unpaid work, leisure and self-care; women's burden of a ‘second shift’ of unpaid work; the role of education and income in eroding gender norms; and the impact of grandparents on time-use.     

Does off-farm employment contribute to agriculture-based environmental pollution? New insights from a village-level analysis in Jiangxi Province, China

This study examines the conventional wisdom that off-farm employment contributes to environmental pollution by increasing the use of agro-chemicals. In order to analyse the role of household decision making and village factor markets in more detail, we run simulations with a hybrid farm household/village computable general equilibrium model that is applied to a village in Northeast Jiangxi Province. We find that the negative lost-labour effect of off-farm employment on agricultural incomes is much stronger than the (small) positive income effect. As a result of reduced labour resources and increased leisure consumption, farm households reduce the intensity of rice cultivation as well as the production of (especially) cash crops. The shift in production activities is stronger for migration than for off-farm employment, because migrants cannot combine off-farm work with onfarm work, and because migration reduces the village market price of oxen services. The shift towards less intensive rice production means that off-farm employment (and migration in particular) reduces the levels of chemical inputs and manure used in agricultural production. The decline in fertilizer input is much larger than the decline in manure use, because manure is a nontradable commodity and is applied only once per year. We therefore conclude that migration and, to a lesser extent, local off-farm employment lead to lower incomes from agricultural production, but have benign effects on environmental quality.     

Why do parents make their children work? A test of the poverty hypothesis in rural areas of Burkina Faso

It is often argued that child labour is caused by poverty. However,much child labour takes place in rural areas characterized bysubstantial labour market imperfections. A model of rural householdlabour supply is developed that provides testable implicationsfor two versions of the poverty hypothesis: that child labouris due to a binding subsistence constraint and that child leisureis a luxury good. We find that in rural Burkina Faso childrendo not provide labour to meet households' subsistence needsand that child leisure is a normal good. The evidence suggeststhat labour market imperfections are a main reason for usingchild labour.     

Differences in Food Preparation by Race and Ethnicity: Evidence from the American Time Use Survey

This paper examines factors that influence individuals’ time use decisions regarding food preparation. Using American Time Use Survey data, Tobit estimates confirm that time spent on food preparation differs by race, ethnicity and socio-economic status. In general, hours worked, age, and education are negatively associated with time spent preparing food-cooked-at-home, while family care and leisure time are positively associated with it. Time spent purchasing prepared-food, on the other hand, has a positive relation to hours worked, family care, leisure time, education, and income, although its effects significantly differ by race and ethnicity. Estimates further show a positive relationship between time spent preparing food-cooked-at-home and family size, supporting the Barten theory of scale economies in home production.     

Do Japanese Work Shorter Hours than before? Measuring trends in market work and leisure using 1976–2006 Japanese time-use survey

Using Japanese time-use data from the Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities (STULA), this paper measures trends in average hours worked (market work) and leisure for Japanese over the past three decades. OECD reports at least a 15% decline in market work for Japan since the 1970s. However, holding demographic changes constant, we found that market work per week increased from the 1970s until mid-1980s, and has been relatively stable for the last two decades for both male and female full-time workers. Furthermore, although the market work per week remained relatively constant since the mid-1980s, we found a significant change in the allocation of time to market work within the week during the period. Specifically, when dividing samples into weekdays (Monday–Friday) and weekends (Saturday and Sunday), average hours spent for market work per weekday among full-time males increased by 0.4 h since the mid-1980s, whereas a significant decline in market work on Saturday was observed. This suggests that people shifted their work time from Saturday to weekdays in response to the reduced work week introduced by the amendment of the Labor Standards Act at the end of 1980s. In the meantime, commuting time and home production had decreased by 3 h since the mid-1980s for full-time female workers, indicating that the average hours of leisure had increased for females even though market work remained the same. Interestingly, however, hours for sleep declined consistently over the last three decades, resulting in a 3–4 h reduction per week for both male and female workers. Lastly, a comparison of Japanese and US time-use data suggests that Japanese work much longer than their American counterparts. On average, Japanese males work 10 h longer per week, and Japanese females 7 h longer, than Americans, even after adjusting for demographic differences between the countries.     

Who Has the Time? Community College Students’ Time-Use Response to Financial Incentives

We evaluate the effect of performance-based scholarship programs for post-secondary students on student time use and effort and whether these effects are different for students we hypothesize may be more or less responsive to incentives. To do so, we administered a time-use survey as part of a randomized experiment in which community college students in New York City were randomly assigned to be eligible for a performance-based scholarship or to a control group that was only eligible for the standard financial aid. This paper contributes to the literature by attempting to get inside the “black box” of how students respond to a monetary incentive to improve their educational attainment. We find that students eligible for a scholarship devoted more time to educational activities, increased the quality of effort toward and engagement with their studies, and allocated less time to leisure. Additional analyses suggest that students who were plausibly more myopic (place less weight on future benefits) were more responsive to the incentives, but we find no evidence that students who are arguably more time constrained were less responsive to the incentives.

     

Does microcredit reduce the gender gap in employment? Evidence from Egypt

In Egypt, there is a remarkable gap between men's and women's participation in the labour market. In this study, we examine the impact of microcredit on the labour supply of men and women and subsequently investigate whether microcredit can reduce the employment gap between men and women in Egypt. We find a negative effect of microcredit on men's employment, but a positive effect on the employment of women. Borrowing from a microcredit source increases the probability of women working by 8.5 percentage points and mainly affects self‐employed work. We also find a positive effect of microcredit on work in small businesses. This finding suggests that women can use microcredit to open small shops or household businesses. Finally, using decomposition analysis, we find that microcredit reduces the overall employment gap between men and women by 0.743%.     

Gender,occupation, or workplace: what mattered for the gender gap in the Swedish tobacco industry?

Abstract

Historical studies on earnings differentials are largely based on group data and much less so on micro-level data. We use detailed information from a nationwide survey that matches employers and employees and covers the entire tobacco industry in Sweden in 1898. When comparing the labour market outcomes of women to those of men, we find that the cost of being female varied across branches, which contributed to the overall earnings gap in the industry. Earnings differentials reflect horizontal as well as vertical segregation. Female workers were concentrated in the low-skilled segments of tobacco work but were not kept out of the skilled and better paid segments. Alongside with this, there are indications of a glass ceiling pattern; gender mattered more at the top of earnings distribution than at the bottom deciles. Where men and women actually performed the same tasks, gender mattered less for earnings, but due to segregation this was not the situation for all workers.     

A study of time allocation of Japanese households

In this study, we compare the patterns of time allocation of the young (age 25–39) and the elderly (age 65 or above), the employed and the unemployed, male and female Japanese households. We examine how economic rationality and the Japanese culture play their roles in determining the patterns of time allocations. Views are proposed that (1) the persisting male–female gap in the non-market domestic working hours observed in Japan is better explained by the Japanese culture than the Japanese tax system or male–female wage differential, (2) the relatively low wage-elasticity of labor supply of Japanese young males is an indication of the fact that young males enjoy considerable amount of on-the-job leisure. Further, we observe that (3) the life-cycle pattern of time allocation to sleep (and other time use for health care) is of the U-type so that the elderly invest more time on health care than the young, (4) sleeping time decreased in 1986 as compared to 1976 in Japan which might be due to the improvement of medical technology, and (5) contrary to US experience, higher wages are associated with longer hours of sleep for the Japanese young. The Appendix Aprovides a restrictive time-allocation model with special reference to time use for health care which provides theoretical support for empirical findings.     

The Impact of Cannabis Use on Health

Summary Chronic daily cannabis use has been shown to have long term harmful health effects, which in turn is expected to reduce labour market productivity. The evidence is less clear on the health impact of less frequent consumption, which is the more typical mode of use, and previous empirical studies fail to find robust evidence of an adverse impact of these modes of use on labour market productivity. This paper attempts to shed some light on this issue by directly estimating the impact of cannabis consumption in the past week and past year on health status using information on prime age individuals living in Australia. We find that cannabis use does reduce self-assessed health status, with the effect of weekly use being of a similar magnitude as smoking cigarettes daily. Moreover, we find evidence of a dose-response relationship in the health impact of cannabis use, with annual use having roughly half the impact of weekly use.Helpful comments on an earlier draft were received from Jan van Ours, Rosalie Pacula, two anonymous referees and participants at the 81st Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association International.     

Vulnerability of households to health shocks: an Indonesian study

We examine the effect of illness and injury shocks on work hours and household consumption in Indonesia. Using indices of activities of daily living to measure health shocks, we find that both labour hours and household consumption are influenced by health shocks to household heads. Further, farm households seem to be more seriously affected than non-farm households by health shocks. However, the magnitude of the health effect on household consumption is small, implying that even farm households are well protected on average by the presence of formal and informal risk-coping mechanisms.     

Has the compulsory school merger program reduced the welfare of rural residents in China?

The compulsory school merger program in rural regions of China imposed higher education costs on rural residents, decreased their consumption and reduced their welfare. In this study, we employ household-level data and the difference-in-differences method to analyze the policy effect on residents' consumption and education costs. Our results show that the compulsory school merger program had a negative effect on the consumption of rural residents and inflicted multiple education costs on them. We also find that the increase in the distance between school and home is an important explanation for the effect of this policy on rural residents' education costs.     

Does birth spacing affect female labor market participation? Evidence from urban China

This paper investigates the impact of birth spacing on female labor market participation in urban China. Employing household panel surveys between 1989 and 2011 and exploiting variations in time intervals between the first and second child, we find that spacing births at longer intervals significantly increases female labor market participation. The effects of birth spacing are robust to various examinations that consider nonlinear specifications, selection on observed and unobserved variables, and the plausibly exogenous instrument. The heterogeneous analysis suggests that the effects of birth spacing are more pronounced in women with a daughter as the first birth, women with late first birth, and less-educated women. We examine potential mechanisms and document that women with longer birth intervals are likely to invest more in continuing education and have better health status.     

市场失灵视域下公共休闲产品可持续消费约束机制分析

休闲权是人类的基本权力之一。随着人们收入的提高和闲暇时间的增加,对公共休闲消费产品的需求越来越大。在公共休闲产品消费过程中,必须遵循可持续消费原则,做到适度消费、公平消费、节约消费。但是,市场失灵导致公共休闲场所和休闲设施供给不足,无法充分满足人民群众日益增长的休闲需要;市场失灵使企业和个人在公共休闲资源消费中存在着过度开发、过度消费现象,造成＂公地悲剧＂;市场失灵使不同消费群体之间在公共休闲服务和休闲资源的消费方面存在着大量非公平现象。弥补市场失灵,解决问题的对策在于加强制度建设,包括完善政府在公共休闲产品供给方面的职能、建立公共休闲资源产权转让监督制度;完善公共休闲资源配置中的公共选择机制,建立公众参与和表达制度等。