Abstract
This paper analyzes the time allocation of self-employed individuals and the impact of housework activities on earnings of self-employed individuals. In contrast to men and women in paid employment time allocation of self-employed individuals was more gendered with men performing more market work. Also differences in daily routine of activities occurred. While descriptive statistics and pooled OLS earnings regressions indicated a negative correlation between time spent on housework activities and earnings, fixed effects earnings regressions only showed a significantly negative impact on monthly earnings of self-employed men. This impact disappeared after controlling for potential endogeneity via instrumental variable estimators.
Notes
For a recent survey on the existing empirical and theoretical literature on time spent on housework hours on workers’ wages I refer to Maani and Cruickshank (2010).
Walker (2009) extended Hundley’s studies and controlled for housework hours and the effort individuals expended at housework activities.
For a discussion of work-to-family and family-to-work spillovers see Ruppanner and Pixley (2012). Minnotte (2012) investigated the impact of family structure (single vs partnered parents) on the work-to-family conflict. Tuttle and Garr (2012) analyzed the impact of shift work and work schedule control on the work-to-family conflict. Maume and Sebastian (2012) analyzed the relationship between nonstandard work schedules, work-to-family conflict and marital quality. Schieman and Young (2011) investigated the relationship between economic hardship and the family-to-work conflict. Myrie and Daly (2009) analyzed the use of boundaries by self-employed individuals, who were working at home, in order to manage family and work.
By using time use data it is possible to identify interruptions during the market work.
Pure leisure was defined as the time use without housework activities and personal regeneration.
If the additional amount of time spent on personal regeneration is larger than the decrease of time spent on pure leisure self-employed individuals can spend less time on market work and housework activities. Therefore, a negative impact of time spent on housework activities on self-employed individuals’ earnings can exists.
Other sample restrictions (e.g., limitation of time spend on market work for all individuals up to 60 h or excluding the bottom and top one percent in respect to hourly gross earnings and wages) did not change the insights qualitatively.
The equations for OLS regressions were without v i .
In contrast to the empirical literature for paid workers, I did not include dummy variables for occupation or/and industry. The reason was that self-employed individuals did not change their industry/occupation they were working in as much as paid workers. Therefore, there was not enough variation in the data for fixed effects. The same held for federal states, so that I did not use dummy variables for the federal states of Germany and a dummy for East Germany, respectively. Separate earnings regressions for East Germany and West Germany did not change the insights qualitatively.
Although my instrument was standard in the literature, I was aware that some endogeneity might still exist even after instrumenting housework. For example, I could not rule out that idiosyncratic earnings shocks unrelated to changes in observed covariates induced the individual to become the owner of the residence, so that the rise in housework following the change in ownership might be endogenous with respect to earnings and FE IV regressions might still suffer from endogeneity. Unfortunately, my data sets did not contain other credible sets of instruments to investigate this issue further.
Personal regeneration consisted of the following activities: sleeping, eating and drinking, other tasks of personal regeneration, and (short) regeneration and timeout.
The analysis of self-employed individuals with and without employees might also contribute to the question about the impact of housework on earnings. Self-employed individuals with employees might be more flexible in combining market career and housework because of the employees can continue the business and create earnings even if the self-employed individual is not present. I supposed that housework hours had no negative impact on the earnings of self-employed individuals with employees while there might be a negative impact for self-employed individuals without employees who were less flexible in combining market work and housework responsibilities.
These coefficients were very high but one had to keep in mind that the regressions were without dummy variables for occupation, industry, and federal states. If one included these control variables, the housework coefficients decreased. (Results are not shown in tables but are available from the author on request.).
These results are not shown in tables but are available from the author on request.
Results are not shown in tables but are available from the author on request.
Walker (2009) used US-data for self-employed individuals from St. Croix Country, Wisconsin from 2004.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Claus Schnabel, two anonymous referees, and the editor of this journal for very helpful suggestions. I also appreciate the comments received from participants of a Ph.D. seminar at Nuremberg.
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Konietzko, T. Self-Employed Individuals, Time Use, and Earnings. J Fam Econ Iss 36, 64–83 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-014-9411-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-014-9411-6