The effect of macroeconomic conditions on parental time with children: evidence from the American time use survey

Patrick Bauer and Lyudmyla Sonchak
Additional contact information
Patrick Bauer: George Washington University

Review of Economics of the Household, 2017, vol. 15, issue 3, No 9, 905-924

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigates the effect of changes in macroeconomic conditions on time allocation to children among mothers and fathers in the US. The study relies on 2003–2013 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data. Accounting for a variety of personal demographic characteristics, as well as state and year fixed effects, we find that an increase in state-level unemployment rates is associated with an increase in enriching child–father time in families with small children (ages 0–4). However, there is heterogeneity in results by race, education and marital status, with results being statistically significant for white, married and college-educated fathers. Additionally, we find some evidence that an increase in unemployment rates is also associated with an increase in primary childcare for fathers in families with small children, as well as some declines in total time that fathers spend with older children. In contrast to this result, we find that mothers’ total time with children, as well as primary childcare time, is invariant to macroeconomic fluctuations in the labor market, however, as the unemployment rate goes up we do observe small declines in enriching time that white mothers in families with small children devote to enriching activities.

Keywords: Time allocation; parental time-use; unemployment; childcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-017-9368-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:reveho:v:15:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s11150-017-9368-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-017-9368-y

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().