Inequality in the Joint Distribution of Consumption and Time Use

Jeehoon Han, Bruce Meyer () and James Sullivan
Additional contact information
Bruce Meyer: The University of Chicago

No 2018-081, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: This paper examines inequality in both leisure and consumption over the past four decades using time use surveys stretching from 1975 to 2016. We show that individual and family characteristics, especially when including work hours, explain most of the long run variation in leisure. We then use these characteristics to predict the distribution of leisure in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, a survey that also provides detailed information on consumption. The advantage of this approach is that it gives us measures of consumption and leisure at the family level within a single data source. We find that leisure time is highest for families at the bottom of the consumption distribution, and typically declines monotonically as consumption rises. However, the consumption-leisure gradient is small. We find noticeable differences across family types, with the gradient being largest for single parent families and single individuals and smallest for families with a head age 65 or older. Overall, these results indicate that including both leisure and consumption, as opposed to just consumption, in a measure of economic well- being will result in less inequality. However, because the consumption-leisure gradient is not very steep, the dampening effect of leisure on overall inequality is small.

Keywords: Inequality; welfare; poverty; Labor Supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I30 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
Note: MIP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Han_Me ... dist-consumption.pdf First version, November, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Inequality in the joint distribution of consumption and time use (2020)
Chapter: Inequality in the Joint Distribution of Consumption and Time Use (2018)
Working Paper: Inequality in the Joint Distribution of Consumption and Time Use (2018)
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:hka:wpaper:2018-081

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().