Timing and Time Use

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PROJECT SUMMARYThe projects described in this Accomplishment-Based Renewal examine issues in the economics of the timing of activities and thus extend the PI's earlier research on the timing of market work. To every human activity is attached an index of when it occurs as well as how much of it is consumed and where it is accomplished. Timing can be expected to vary across individuals and internationally in ways that are predictable from differences in the value of time, marital status, and stages of the life cycle. This observation leads to the construction of models designed to examine such things as: The role of "start-up" costs and their implications for the incidence and duration of activities; the nature of "routine" and its variations across individuals and societies; the importance of marital sharing and the gains from marriage in the area of timing of activities.In each case the behavior modifies our inferences about interhousehold differences in economic welfare. The project will analyze these and other aspects of timing using time-budget data from the U.S. and four other countries, with international comparisons wherever the data allow. The results will provide the first demographic accounting of the timing of activities. More importantly, they will allow testing hypotheses about time use in an instantaneous context, as opposed to the integrativecontext that has characterized all previous empirical work.