Taxes and Time Allocation: Evidence from Single Women

Alexander Gelber () and Joshua W. Mitchell

No 15583, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Hundreds of papers have investigated how incentives and policies affect hours worked in the market. This paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation in the other two-thirds of the day. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1975 to 2004, we analyze the response of single women's housework, labor supply, and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income levels, number of children, states, and time. We find that when the economic reward to participating in the labor force increases, market work increases and housework decreases, with the decrease in housework accounting for approximately two-thirds of the increase in market work. Analysis of repeated cross-sections of time diary data from 1975 to 2004 shows that changes in "home production" account for at least half of the increase in market hours of work in response to policy changes. Data on expenditures from the Consumer Expenditure Survey from 1980 to 2003 show some evidence that expenditures on market goods likely to substitute for housework increase in response to a greater incentive to join the labor force. The baseline estimates imply that the elasticity of substitution between consumption of home and market goods is 2.43. The results are consistent with the classic time allocation model of Becker (1965).

JEL-codes: E32 H2 H24 H3 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-12
Note: EFG LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Taxes and Time Allocation: Evidence from Single Women and Men, with Joshua W. Mitchell, Review of Economic Studies 2012, 79(3), 863-897 (lead article; earlier version circulated as NBER Working Paper 15583, "Taxes and Time Allocation: Evidence from Single Women").

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15583.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Taxes and Time Allocation: Evidence from Single Women (2010)
Working Paper: Taxes and Time Allocation: Evidence from Single Women (2009)
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:nbr:nberwo:15583

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15583

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().