TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hamermesh,Daniel S.
TI  - Routine
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9440
PY  - 2003
Y2  - January 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9440
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9440.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daniel S. Hamermesh
Department of Economics
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712-1173
Tel: 512/475-8526
Fax: 512/471-3510
E-Mail: hamermes@eco.utexas.edu
AB  - Routine - maintaining the same schedule from day to day - saves time. It is also boring and inherently undesirable. As such, the amount of routine a person engages in is partly an economic outcome, with variations in routine generated by variations in the price of time, household income and the ability to generate variety. Using time-budget data from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, I show that men engage in more routine behavior than women, but only because they spend more time in (routine) market work. Other things equal, more educated people engage in less routine behavior, while higher household incomes enable people to purchase more temporal variety. Spouses' temporal routines are highly complementary. The positive income effects and impacts of schooling indicate yet another avenue by which standard measures of inequality understate total economic inequality.
ER  -