Measuring trends in leisure: the allocation of time over five decades

Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst

No 06-2, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Abstract: In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We document that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing ?inequality? in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.

Keywords: Leisure; Hours of labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-tur
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades (2007)
Working Paper: Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades (2006)
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