EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A gift of time

Daiji Kawaguchi, Jungmin Lee and Daniel Hamermesh

Labour Economics, 2013, vol. 24, issue C, 205-216

Abstract: How would people spend time if confronted by permanent declines in market work? We identify preferences off exogenous cuts in standard hours that raised employers' overtime costs in Japan around 1990 and Korea in the early 2000s. We use time diaries to relate the probability that an individual was affected by the legislation to behavioral changes. Reduced-form estimates show that the direct effect was a substantial reduction in market time, with the freed-up time in Japan reallocated to leisure, in Korea partly to household production. Simulations using GMM estimates of a Stone–Geary utility function suggest no effect on household production in either country. A household model shows only sparse evidence that spouses shared the time gift, or that one spouse's non-market time use changed when the other spouse's market work was exogenously reduced.

Keywords: Time use; Household production; Labor legislation; Freedom from work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537113001024
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: A Gift of Time (2012) Downloads
Working Paper: A Gift of Time (2012) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:24:y:2013:i:c:p:205-216

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2013.09.003

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:labeco:v:24:y:2013:i:c:p:205-216