Abstract
Using data from the 2003–2010 American Time Use Survey combined with U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on state-level unemployment rates, we examine how couple time together is affected by macroeconomic conditions. We find a U-shaped relationship between the unemployment rate and the time that couples who have children spend together, with the lowest amount of time together occurring when unemployment rates are around 9 %. We explore how these patterns are related to the timing of work. Our evidence suggests mothers’ work hours are shifted from standard daytime hours to weekend hours, consistent with difficulty in aligning work schedules at moderately high unemployment rates.
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Notes
Ariizumi et al. (2013) provide a theoretical framework that suggests that the effects of a recession on divorce is ambiguous and depend on whether the recessions’ negative effects on the gains from staying in an existing marriage are larger than its’ effects on the quality of the pool of individuals available in the remarriage market.
The one exception is that men’s satisfaction with doing domestic tasks alone or together differs little.
In 2010, respondents were asked whom they were with while working so we deleted these times together to maintain consistency in time together across all categories.
While not all respondents record activities for the full 1440 min in the diary day, respondents are automatically discarded by ATUS staff if their diaries contain fewer than five activities and are missing 180 or more minutes of recorded activities (low quality diaries). However, many researchers exclude those missing more than 60 min of time. Failure to include all respondents in analyses may bias results. Only 5 % of our sample is missing more than 60 min of activities. Results excluding these individuals are similar.
In general, men in the ATUS have lower response rates than women. To account for differential survey nonresponse, ATUS weights are adjusted to be higher for men than women (U.S. Department of Labor 2011b). Although these are not the same couples, their observable characteristics, such as age and education, are similar (see Appendix Table 5).
We considered several other proxies for macroeconomic conditions (including a shorter lag and MSA unemployment rates) with similar results for our preferred specification.
Appendix Fig. 4 illustrates the substantial variation in state unemployment rates for our sample over the period.
This specification is similar to those commonly used when exploring the relationship between demographic outcomes and the business cycle (e.g., Ruhm 2000), except that here we model the state unemployment rate as a quadratic. With state and year fixed effects, one is implicitly calculating deviations from the sample means.
Year fixed effects are included to capture any long-run trends in time use, such as the documented increases in total leisure time pre-Great Recession (Aguiar et al. 2013). We explored the sensitivity of the results to omitting the year fixed effects. Time use changes slowly over time, but excluding the year fixed effects allows identification to come from the additional variation over the time period studied. The effects were smaller in magnitude, but the patterns were similar. Results are available from the authors upon request.
All results presented in the paper are weighted; however, unweighted results are similar (results available upon request).
See U.S. Department of Labor (2012).
Appendix Table 6 includes the full set of estimated coefficients corresponding to the quadratic specification in Table 2, Row A. The estimates on the covariates are in line with expectations. Non-Hispanic black couples spend 45 min less together on average relative to non-Hispanic white couples. When the youngest child in the household is an infant, couples spend about 19 min more together, and couples spend more time together in the winter and summer than in the fall. Consistent with the estimated coefficient on state unemployment rates, holding all else equal, couples are spending more time together in 2009 and 2010 relative to the year 2005.
Elsby et al. (2010) and Hoynes et al. (2012) document that males were more affected than females, those who do not hold a college degree were more affected than those with a college degree, youths were more affected than prime-age workers and the elderly, and non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics were more affected than non-Hispanic whites and Asians by the Great Recession. Most of these differences resulted from job losses in industries, such as construction and manufacturing, where certain demographic groups of workers were concentrated.
110 women and 42 men do not report being employed but reported minutes of work on their diary day. We use the employed definition for official BLS labor force statistics (TELFS = 1 or 2). Some respondents may have done unpaid work in a family business.
One may be concerned that the sample composition is itself changing over time if, for example, couples with a higher preference for time spent together are disproportionately more likely to be both working during a period of low state-level unemployment. Then, the pattern would be driven by the unobserved preferences of the sample of dual earners, rather than a fixed sample of dual earners having different work patterns over time. However, since estimates using the full sample are very similar (and the single- and sole-earner couple estimates are not significant), it seems unlikely that sample composition changes are driving the dual-earner couple results.
We also examine cohabiting couples separately and find that their time alone as a couple is strongly affected by the recession, but not their family time (results available upon request).
In estimates not shown, we found that leisure time alone as a couple and with children contributed almost equally to the U-shaped relationship between leisure time and the unemployment rate.
Couples without co-resident children spend significantly more time together as the unemployment rate rises. A 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a 4.9 min increase in couples’ time together (results available upon request). The majority of the increase over the recession comes from changes in shared leisure time rather than changes in shared housework. This increase in shared couple time, especially leisure time, which is consistently reported as preferable to other activities, could potentially contribute to the drop in divorce rates during the Great Recession. Given that we find only a positive linear effect of unemployment rates on time together for couples without children, it further suggests that our results are consistent with the Barnet-Verzat et al. (2011) finding that children complicate work schedule synchronization.
Mattingly and Smith (2010) found that women were more likely to start work or increase their hours if their spouse lost his job in the Great Recession than if their spouse lost a job during periods of economic prosperity; however, there were many who could not find a job. Thus, it is likely that they may have had to take positions that they would not have chosen in times of prosperity, perhaps positions with undesirable working hours.
In results not shown, we explored using the time periods 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. as the “standard work hours.” Results were similar in each of these cases. We chose to present the results for 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. because these are standard hours for school and/or daycare. In results not shown, we included a specification for weekday time diaries where the dependent variable was whether or not the parent worked the majority of hours during the 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. time. In this specification, parents who reported 0 h of work on the time diary day were coded as not working the majority of time in non-standard hours. The results from this specification were never significant for mothers or fathers. This specification is similar in spirit to Connelly and Kimmel (2011), who model the effects of non-standard work hours on time spent engaging in childcare. Connelly and Kimmel show that mothers and fathers who work the majority of their hours outside of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. engage in childcare throughout the day, while mothers and fathers who work the majority of their hours during the “standard” 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. time slot spend more time in childcare in the mornings and early evenings. However, they do not consider whether total childcare time varies between parents working standard versus non-standard hours.
This weekend pattern is even stronger if the sample is restricted to mothers married to men without a college degree (results available upon request).
Total time with children, here, differs in definition from primary childcare time examined in many other papers using the ATUS (e.g., Aguiar et al. 2013; Colman and Dave 2013), which only considers time where the parent is focused on the child’s basic needs or playing with children as defined by ATUS and likely misses important developmental time interacting with older children.
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Acknowledgments
All views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The authors would like to thank Dhaval Dave, Michael Giandrea, Jennifer Hook, Charlene Kalenkoski, David Ribar, Almudena Sevilla-Sanz, Jay Stewart, and Jennifer Ward-Batts for their useful suggestions. This paper benefited from comments from participants at the 2010 International Association of Time Use Researchers’ Conference, the 2011 International Perspectives on Time Use Conference at the University of Maryland, the 2011 Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting, the 2012 Society of Labor Economists Annual Meeting, and Ohio University.
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Morrill, M.S., Pabilonia, S.W. What effects do macroeconomic conditions have on the time couples with children spend together?. Rev Econ Household 13, 791–814 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-015-9285-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-015-9285-x