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Marriage: for love, for money…and for time?

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Abstract

Married couples enjoy meaningful economies in time, often choosing to specialize where one spouse focuses on market work and the other on household production and childcare. Using data from the American Time Use Survey 2003–2008, I estimate significant marriage effects upon time use. Most married women gain 33–34 min of leisure each weekday when compared to single women. While marriage does not lead to more leisure for husbands, it allows them to allocate time away from home and towards market work. Lower-income couples work more at home and for pay, and spend less time in leisure than their single counterparts. The temporal and financial gains from marriage for most people are inconsistent with its declining prevalence.

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Notes

  1. According to the Census Bureau, the proportion of married couples decreased from 84% in 1930 to 56% in 1990, and to under 50% in 2006.

  2. 34.5 h*$15 $/h =  $517.5.

  3. According to the Consumer Expenditure Survey 2006, an average two-person household spent over 12% of its total expenditures on food at home and away from home, not including alcohol. Average total annual expenditures was $50,652, including $6,203 on food whereas single adults spent on average $3,249 on food. Source: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2006/cusize.txt.

  4. ATUS is an ongoing annual survey with over 85,000 interviews over 6 years. Its respondents are a subset of households which have finished their last rotation in the Current Population Survey. For a complete description of the survey see http://www.bls.gov/tus/. See Hamermesh et al. (2005) for a overview and discussion of ATUS.

  5. Grossbard-Shechtman and Jepsen (2008) suggest that non-traditional households may require a separate analysis.

  6. A famous saying goes “Nobody ever washed a rental car.”

  7. Wages, earnings and incomes are converted to 2008 dollars using the CPI from www.bls.gov.

  8. Poverty thresholds can be found at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/threshld.html.

  9. A similar technique, with variations, is used by Kalenkoski et al. (2005), Kimmel and Connelly (2006), Bloemen and Stancanelli (2009).

  10. The Heckman participation and log wage equations are estimated over all employed individuals from the CPS-ATUS sample, which is a much larger sample that includes observations on over 160,000 individuals over 7 survey years. Log wage and participation regressions include the following controls: age, age-squared, indicators for black, Hispanic, 4 education dummies, married and never married status, indicators for a non-US citizen, a naturalized citizen (to account for difference in English language skills that might impact employment and wages), metropolitan residence, region dummies, year of the survey dummies, local monthly unemployment rate. The employment participation equation is identified by the inclusion of the presence and number of children by age groups, and the student status. According to these estimates, married men are 32% more likely to be employed, with marriage wage premium of 10%. Marriage decreases women’s probability to be employed by 23%, but women’s marriage wage premium is also positive, 6%.

  11. This result is consistent with Kalenkoski et al. (2005), who find single fathers spend more time in primary childcare than married fathers.

  12. These data and description are available at: http://www.nber.org/data/ces_cbo.html Sample characteristics and methodology are described in “Appendix”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Empire State College/SUNY, 325 Hudson St, New York, NY, 10013, USA

    Victoria Vernon

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Correspondence to Victoria Vernon.

Appendix: Calculations based on NBER Consumer Expenditure Survey Family-Level Extracts 2002–03

Appendix: Calculations based on NBER Consumer Expenditure Survey Family-Level Extracts 2002–03

NBER Consumer Expenditure Survey Family-Level Extracts are annual household-level data derived by linking the four quarterly interviews for each Consumer Expenditure Survey respondent family. The extract contains information on annual expenditures, incomes, household composition and demographics. I select one and two adult families with and without children, so that the final sample contains 6640 households. Mean values are listed in Appendix Table 4. Single headed households account for 36% of the sample. Children live in 42% of the households. Overall the racial and educational composition of the sample is similar to the one found in the time use data and is representative of the US population.

Table 4 Sample means and OLS estimates of the expenditure equations
Full size table

Total expenditure includes food, nonfood, clothing, personal care, shelter, recreation, education, personal insurance, transportation, charity. I also separately examine three major expenditure categories—food, shelter and transportation—in order to compare relative economies in these items. Food expenditure includes food eaten at home and away from home, excluding alcohol. Shelter includes rent or value of owner occupied housing, utilities, household help and 10% of the value of purchased furnishings and appliances. Transportation includes 10% of the cost of new vehicles, gasoline, vehicle maintenance, auto insurance, public and other transportation. While these measurements of expenditures are far from being perfect, for example, they do not include service value of durable goods purchased in previous years, they will still give us a rough idea on how much money an average couple saves by living together.

The following relationship between per adult household expenditure and family composition is estimated:

$$ {\text{Per}}\;{\text{Adult}}\;{\text{Expenditure}} = \alpha {\text{SingleMan}} + \beta {\text{SingleWoman}} + \gamma {\text{X}} + \varepsilon . $$

Vector X includes presence and number of children, employment status of the household head, race, education and age of the household head, annual income per adult, and, to refine the income variable further, indicators for low income food stamp recipients and housing ownership status.

The sum of the coefficients on SingleMan and SingleWoman shows how much more a single man and a single woman living apart spend compared to an otherwise similar married couple.

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Vernon, V. Marriage: for love, for money…and for time?. Rev Econ Household 8, 433–457 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-009-9086-1

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