The Multitasking of Household Production

Abstract

The standard household production model pioneered by Gary Becker (1965) does not allow time to be spent simultaneously in difierent activities. No theoretical framework for household production to date incorporates multitasking as an economic decision. Yet, time-diary data are often speciflcally collected in such a way as to capture multitasking, and these data reveal that individuals indeed regularly multitask. For example, child care|a core component of household production|is regularly performed while doing housework. In this paper, we formulate a household production model that allows time spent in child care to be sole-tasked or multitasked with other household production activities. We then use data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to empirically examine our prior that sole-tasked and multitasked child care have difierent productivities (in terms of child outcomes). Finally, we derive some empirical implications of our model that we test using repeated cross-sections of data from the Australian Time Use Surveys to show that parents make choices to sole-task or multitask for reasons related to constraints and