On the importance of time diary data and introduction to a special issue on time use research

Abstract

Economists are interested in how people behave under scarcity, and the most obvious scarce resource in the economy is time. Becker (1965) provided the framework for analyzing time allocation decisions, but other than some pioneering exceptions (such as Juster and Stafford 1985; Kooreman and Kapteyn 1987; Biddle and Hamermesh 1990) economists have only recently started to incorporate time outside the market in economic theory (see Hamermesh and Pfann (2005) for a review). Articles in this special issue on time use illustrate how time diary data can offer an ideal instrument not only to measure patterns of time allocation, but also to generate further understanding of economic decision-making processes. The opening paper brings together the two overarching topics in this issue: gender and the under-researched topic of children’s time use. ‘‘Household structure and housework: Assessing the contributions of all household members, with a focus on children and youths’’ by Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan uses the UK Office of National Statistics Time Use Survey of 2000/1 to quantify the contributions to housework of all members of households—not just the adult members—accounting for heterogeneity across household types by taking into consideration the different roles of individuals within different household types. For example, the authors show that adolescent daughters do more housework than adolescent sons, and also that daughters aged under 12 behave differently depending on whether they are in a household including older children or not (doing more housework when they are). Taking these interactions into consideration can substantially improve the model’s fitness relative to a model ignoring the different roles of individuals in different household types. This descriptive exercise further supports the previous findings that the couple’s division of labor cannot give a true picture of the distribution of housework and child care within the home so long as a