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 -