Togetherness: Spouses' Synchronous Leisure, and the Impact of Children

Daniel S. Hamermesh

72 citations0/0 files storedNational Bureau of Economic Research

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics Family Dynamics and Relationships Work-Family Balance Challenges

Abstract

This study goes beyond the immense literature on the quantity of labor that households supply to examine the timing of their labor/leisure choices.Using two-year panels from the United States in the 1970s it demonstrates that couples prefer to consume leisure simultaneously: Synchronization is greater than random male-female pairing would predict.In the 1970s the demand for joint leisure among working couples was more responsive to increases in wives' earnings than to husbands', but by the 1990s the responses were identical.Couples react to changes in constraints on them by altering their schedules to preserve joint leisure, and those with higher full incomes consume more of their leisure jointly.Children reduce the jointness of spouses' leisure, with the greatest change in schedules occurring among new mothers.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.

References

1995Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital 1981Nash-Bargained Household Decisions: Toward a Generalization of the Theory of Demand 1993Separate Spheres Bargaining and the Marriage Market 1987Female labor supply: A survey 1987Labor supply of men: A survey 1994Like Father, like Son; Like Mother, like Daughter: Parental Resources and Child Height 2000Parenthood and the earnings of married men and women 1994Divergent realities: the emotional lives of mothers, fathers, and adolescents

Cited by

2013Regional unemployment, gender, and time allocation of the unemployed 2007Time with Children: Do Fathers and Mothers Replace Each Other When One Parent is Unemployed?2016Partners’ leisure time truly together upon retirement 2020Do you have time to take a walk together? Private and joint time within the household 2014Do Spouses Coordinate Their Work Exits? A Combined Survey and Register Analysis From Norway 2007

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.