TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ramey, Valerie A
AU  - Francis, Neville
TI  - A Century of Work and Leisure
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12264
PY  - 2006
Y2  - May 2006
DO  - 10.3386/w12264
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12264
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12264.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Valerie A. Ramey
Department of Economics, 0508
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0508
Tel: 858/534-2388
Fax: 858/534-7040
E-Mail: vramey@ucsd.edu

Neville Francis
Department of Economics
University of North Carolina
Gardner Hall, CB#3305
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
Tel: 919-966-5327
E-Mail: nfrancis@unc.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2011-11-11
AB  - Has leisure increased over the last century? Standard measures of hours worked suggest that it has. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive measure of non-leisure hours that includes market work, home production, commuting and schooling for the last 105 years. We also present empirical and theoretical arguments for a definition of %u201Cper capita%u201D that encompasses the entire population. The new measures reveal a number of interesting 20th Century trends. First, 70 percent of the decline in hours worked has been offset by an increase in hours spent in school. Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, average hours spent in home production are actually slightly higher now than they were in the early part of the 20th Century. Finally, leisure per capita is approximately the same now as it was in 1900.
ER  -