The Time Use of Mothers in the United States at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Ch 4 - Husbands' Influences on Mothers' Unpaid Time Choices

79 4 Husbands’ Influences on Mothers’ Unpaid Time Choices Among the key results from the previous chapter are the importance of marital status and spousal income on mothers’ time use. Being married or cohabiting increases home production time on both weekdays and weekends and increases employment and reduced caregiving time on weekdays. Higher spousal income is associated with more leisure time, less employment time, more caregiving time, and more home production on weekdays. The effect of husbands’ higher earnings on weekends is more muted but still increases mothers’ caregiving time and lowers their employment time. In this chapter, we pursue further the role of marital status with an added focus on how husbands’ weekly employment hours and husbands’ time in an unpaid activity affect mothers’ time in the same unpaid activity. We also consider the role of relative wages, that is, a mother’s wage relative to her husband’s in affecting time choices of mothers. Blau and Kahn (2007) show that wives’ labor supply decisions are affected less by spousal factors than they once were, but no such evidence exists concerning unpaid uses of time. Thus, in this chapter we examine three types of out-of-market time: leisure, home production, and caregiving time. PReVIoUS ReSeARCH oN MARRIeD CoUPLeS’ JoINT TIMe USe DeCISIoN MAkINg In order to think about the role that husbands’ time choices may play in mothers’ time decision making, consider the underlying reasons for marriage that can be gleaned from economic models. These models of marriage emphasize the “gains from marriage,” namely, the improvement in well-being upon marriage, which serves to motivate each potential partner to form a partnership. This gain can come from 80 Connelly and Kimmel gains from specialization or gains from complementarities. Gains from specialization rely on the existence of fairly fixed quantities of requisite household goods that can be produced by either the husband or the wife. For example, if dinner needs to be cooked, one member of the couple may do the cooking while the other tends to the children or even reads the newspaper. Thus, we might expect that increased home production time of the husband would reduce the home production time of the wife. If the gains from marriage arise from complementarities, such as enjoying spending leisure time with one’s spouse, then we would predict that an increase in the leisure time of one spouse would increase the leisure time of the other spouse. Hamermesh (2002), Hallberg (2003), and Jenkins and Osberg (2005) find evidence of this desire for simultaneous leisure. Having tastes similar to one’s spouse also increases the gains from marriage (Lam 1988) and may lead to positive correlations in time use other than leisure. For example, if a man who values living in a neat house marries a woman who also values living in a neat house, then they likely both spend more time on home production.1 The household bargaining model literature provides another theoretical framework for understanding why a husband and wife’s time use might be related. Bargaining model proponents extend the unitary model of household decision making proposed by Becker (1991) by arguing that the source of income within a family is an important determinant of who ultimately consumes the items “purchased” by the family, including leisure. The relative wage is expected to determine power within the household for a variety of reasons.2 Unpaid housework has been a particular research focus in the area of couples’ time allocation, in part because changes in women’s labor supply have not brought equal changes in the distribution of unpaid tasks within the household. While women have substantially reduced their home production time and men have somewhat increased theirs, women continue to do a majority of the family’s housework (Fisher et al. 2006). Evidence shows that women perform more unpaid home production than their male counterparts, while marital status is positively related with household production time for women but not men.3 For additional evidence on the role of spouses in time use choices in the United States, we turn to previous research based, like ours, on time diary studies. Kooreman and Kapteyn (1987) use U.S. time diary data Husbands’ Influences on Mothers’ Unpaid Time Choices 81 from 1975–1976 for dual earner couples and find that the husband’s own wages and his wife’s wages have little effect on seven different types of nonmarket time...