| Working
Paper 06-2
by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst
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.
See also: Time
Use Data Sets 
JEL Classifications: D12, D13, J22
PDF version of paper 
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