Education and Women's Time Allocation to Nonmarket Work in an Urban Setting in India

Abstract

The allocation of time by individuals and households is an important concern of economists. The author investigates time allocation to non-market work among urban women in Madras India estimating the derived demand for certain disaggregated measures of household work and child-care hours with the primary goal of examining the responsiveness of non-market time allocations to wages and income and to understand the role of education upon time allocations. The study also examined the exogeneity assumption upon children and hired help variables which are among the other covariates included in the time allocation functions. Findings are based upon data collected in a 1980-81 household survey of 244 working women and 422 women who did not participate in labor market work. The survey was restricted to nuclear households with or without dependents with married women aged 20-59 and with husband present and employed in the year preceding the survey. Data on non-market work were collected using the recall method. The study determined that women in Madras City spend a considerable amount of time in home production. It may be inferred that as a womans wage increases she will spend less time in home production by withdrawing time spent in teaching children. An increase in household assets leads to an increase in time spent teaching children at the expense of other non-market activities. Higher female education reduces the amount of time spent in all non-market activities except teaching the children. There is therefore an enormous relative reallocation of mothers time to childrens education.