TY  - JOUR
AU  - Mullahy,John
AU  - Robert,Stephanie A.
TI  - No Time to Lose? Time Constraints and Physical Activity
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14513
PY  - 2008
Y2  - November 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14513
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14513.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John Mullahy
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dept. of Population Health Sciences
787 WARF, 610 N. Walnut Street
Madison, WI 53726
Tel: 608/265-5410
Fax: 608/263-2820
E-Mail: jmullahy@facstaff.wisc.edu

Stephanie A. Robert
707 WARF, Dept. of Population Health Sciences
610 Walnut St.
Madison, WI 53726
E-Mail: sarobert@wisc.edu
AB  - Although individuals are all endowed with the same time budgets, time use patterns differ owing to heterogeneity in preferences and constraints.  In today's health policy arena there is considerable discussion about how to improve health outcomes by increasing levels of physical activity.  In this paper, we explore how individuals endowed with different levels of human capital allocate time to physically-demanding activities that we characterize as health-producing behaviors. Our data are drawn from multiple years of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which are based on daily time use diaries and include information on detailed physical activity time uses.  Since ATUS time use categories are mutually exclusive and exhaustive -- i.e. "multitasking" is not accommodated -- we employ a novel econometric share equation techniques to enforce the adding-up requirement that time use is constrained to 1,440 minutes per day. We find that differential human capital endowments result in different manifestations of how time is used to produce health.  While more-educated individuals, e.g., sleep much less than less-educated individuals, they utilize some of the time so liberated to exercise and work more.  We find as well that various features of individuals' environments, broadly defined, play important roles in time allocation decisions.
ER  -