Search Results
Working Paper
Measuring trends in leisure: the allocation of time over five decades
In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We document that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work ...
Journal Article
Beautiful city
Proponents of the City Beautiful movement advocated for sizable public investments in monumental spaces, street beautification, and classical architecture. Today, economists and policymakers see the provision of consumer leisure amenities as a way to attract people and jobs to cities. But past studies have provided only indirect evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban growth and development. In this article, Jerry Carlino uses a new data set on the number of leisure tourist visits to metropolitan areas to examine the correlation between leisure consumption opportunities and ...
Journal Article
Working hard or hardly working? the evolution of leisure in the United States
Although Americans appear to be spending less time on the job than they were a hundred years ago, there's some question as to whether they have more leisure time.
Working Paper
Do constraints on market work hours change home production efforts?
We study variations in housework time and leisure consumption when workers are subject to labor market work hours constraints that prevent them from working the optimal number of hours. Using data from two large nationwide longitudinal surveys, we first document that such constraints are widespread--about 50 percent of all households in our sample had been bound by such constraints in at least one year, highlighting the significance of studying household behaviors in labor markets under binding constraints. Our analysis reveals strong heterogeneity and asymmetry in workers' reactions to this ...
Working Paper
Monocentric city redux
This paper argues that centralized employment remains an empirically relevant stylization of midsize U.S. metros. It extends the monocentric model to explicitly include leisure as a source of utility but constrains workers to supply fixed labor hours. Doing so sharpens the marginal disutility from longer commutes. The numerical implementation calibrates traffic congestion to tightly match observed commute times in Portland, Oregon. The implied geographic distribution of CBD workers' residence tightly matches that of Portland. The implied population density, land price, and house price ...
Conference Paper
Measuring trends in leisure
In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we show that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. ...