TY  - JOUR
AU  - Aguiar,Mark
AU  - Hurst,Erik
TI  - Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12082
PY  - 2006
Y2  - March 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12082
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12082.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Mark A. Aguiar
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Fisher Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
E-Mail: mark@markaguiar.com

Erik Hurst
Booth School of Business
University of Chicago
Harper Center
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/834-4073
Fax: 773/702-0458
E-Mail: erik.hurst@chicagobooth.edu
AB  - In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we show that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. Alternatively, the "consumption equivalent" of the increase in leisure is valued at 8 to 9 percent of total 2003 U.S. consumption expenditures. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing "inequality" in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.
ER  -