Technology, institutions and allocation of time in Swedish households 1920-1990

Lars Svensson ()
Additional contact information
Lars Svensson: Department of Economics, Lund University, Postal: Box 7083, 220 07 Lund, Sweden

No 2008:20, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: The modernisation of Swedish households during the twentieth century prompted a considerable productivity growth in household production, which reduced the time input for a fixed volume of routine household work by about 35 per cent 1920-1990. Much of that time was gradually transferred to the labour market, but no evidence can be found for an increase in leisure time. What has been termed a "Cowan paradox" appears in the Swedish data: the output of household services increased significantly with productivity-enhancing technical change. This was, however, the case only in households where small children constituted an impediment to labour market entry. Increased returns to market work induced women who did not face this restriction to allocate more time to the labour market from the mid-1940s. A set of new formal and informal institutions associated with the family eventually redefined the concept of "small children" and so shifted the position of homemaker from being a more or less permanent status of some women to a clearly temporary position of most women.

Keywords: Time allocation; labour supply; household technologies; family policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 N34 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2008-09-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Èconomies et Societés, Histoire Economique Quantitative, 2010, pages 21-46.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2008/wp08-20.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2008/wp08-20.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2008/wp08-20.pdf)

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:hhs:ifauwp:2008_020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).