Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer) 1992
Solberg, Eric J. and David C. Wong. 1992. "Family Time Use: Leisure, Home Production, Market Work, and Work Related Travel." Journal of Human Resources 27(3):485-510.
This study analyzes the two-person, Gronau-type neoclassical model of the household where time use for each person is divided into three basic activities - market work, home production, and pure leisure - plus work related travel time. The latter is treated as predetermined. One contribution of this paper is that the economics of the Gronau model is made clear and a complete comparative static analysis is provided. A second contribution is that the model is subjected to a rigorous empirical test using data that permits the division of time into its four primary components - most data sets do not permit this. Our empirical results do not accord well with the model's predictions or with previous findings by Gronau. In addition, our results suggest that work related travel has an important influence on family time use.
Eric J. Solberg is a professor of economics and David C. Wong is an assistant professor of economics at California State University in Fullerton. The authors thank Gregory M. Duncan for helpful discussions on correcting for selection bias, Andrew Gill for many helpful comments and suggestions at every step of the analysis, and Joyce Pickersgill for calling their attention to the data used in this study and for information about the distribution or marginal tax rates. The authors acknowledge benefits from suggestions made at their department's workshop and from comments by discussants at an annual meeting of the Western Economics Association. They also thank the referees for useful comments. They take responsibility for all errors that remain. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in December 1992 through December 1995 from Eric J. Solberg, Department of Economics, California State University, Fullerton, CA 92634.
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