Flexible Working and Couples' Coordination of Time Schedules

该项目将探索灵活工作的潜力，以提高夫妻协调工作时间表的能力。我们亦会研究有孩子和没有孩子的家庭，以及不同的工作安排（双全职和兼职/全职）是否有不同的影响。研究结果将提高我们对劳动力市场约束如何影响家庭优化时间利用能力的理解，并对旨在提高家庭工作与生活平衡的政策产生影响。拟议的项目将在三个重要方面扩展经济学文献。首先，它将通过研究劳动力市场对夫妻在一起时间的限制对家庭幸福的重要性，而不是像以前的研究那样只考虑个人幸福，来扩展有关灵活工作的新兴文献。其次，它将纳入市场工作的时间，而不是用于市场工作的总时间。只有少数实证研究关注了工作的时间（Connelly and Kimmel, 2007; Rapoport and Le Bourdais, 2008; Presser, 1994; Paley, 2006），只有一项研究模拟了个人在一天中不同时间工作或不工作的选择（Hamermesh, 1999）。第三，我们将超越文献，不仅描述家庭同步模式（Hamermesh, 2002； Jenkins和Osberg, 2005; Sullivan, 1996），而且还评估灵活的工作安排如何影响这些模式，以及灵活的工作如何与家庭结构相互作用。本项目将使用来自英国家庭小组调查（BHPS）的创新和以前未开发的时间安排数据来调查雇主提供灵活工作对夫妻协调时间能力的影响。BHPS包含有关个人及其所属家庭的丰富信息，包括个人劳动力市场经验和灵活工作使用情况的细节。在2003年的第13次浪潮中，BHPS引入了一系列关于工作时间的新问题，据我们所知，这些问题以前从未被利用过。我们将使用回归方法来估计灵活工作对夫妇通过协调他们的工作时间表（同步时间）可以在一起度过的潜在时间的影响。我们还将讨论灵活工作的可能内生性：如果夫妇积极寻求灵活的工作，以便有更多的时间在一起，那么发现灵活的工作安排和同步时间之间的积极联系可能仅仅意味着那些喜欢花更多时间在一起的夫妇也在寻求更灵活的工作条件，而不是更灵活的工作条件“导致”夫妇花更多的时间在一起。因此，从灵活的工作安排和夫妻在一起的时间之间的简单相关性来推断任何因果机制，都会导致对旨在增加工作场所灵活性的任何政策措施的有效性得出错误的结论。我们将使用工具变量（IV）方法来估计因果关系，从BHPS的详细就业历史中构建工具。这项研究的政策相关性是显而易见的。尽管近年来提供灵活（或“家庭友好”）工作安排的工作场所比例有所增加（Whitehouse等人，2007），但家庭仍然面临巨大的限制，阻碍他们尽可能多地协调工作。大约40%的工人没有工作他们想要的小时数（Bryan, 2007）。鉴于政府对推广弹性工作制的兴趣，本研究将是我们所知的第一个评估弹性工作制对夫妻工作时间协调影响的研究，从而增加工作与生活平衡的身体或工作。通过确定从工作场所灵活性中获益最多的群体，它将有助于有针对性地促进工作与生活平衡政策

This project will explore the potential for flexible working to increase couples' ability to coordinate their work schedules. We will also look at whether there are distinct impacts among households with and without children, and with different working arrangements (dual full-time and part-time/full-time). The findings will improve our understanding of how constraints in the labour market affect households' ability to optimise their time use, and have implications for policies designed to increase the work-life balance of families.The proposed project will extend the economics literature in three important ways. First, it will expand the emerging literature on flexible work by examining the importance of labour market constraints on couples' time together as a dimension of household well-being, as opposed to just individual well-being as in previous studies. Second, it will incorporate the timing of market work, as opposed to the total time devoted to market work. Only few empirical studies have looked at the timing of work (Connelly and Kimmel, 2007; Rapoport and Le Bourdais, 2008; Presser, 1994; Paley, 2006), and only one study has modelled the individual choice to work or not at different times of the day (Hamermesh, 1999). Third, we will go beyond the literature by not just describing the patterns of household synchronisation (Hamermesh, 2002; Jenkins and Osberg, 2005; Sullivan, 1996), but also by assessing how flexible work arrangements might influence these patterns and how flexible work interacts with household structure. This project will use innovative and previously unexploited data on time scheduling from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to investigate the effect of the provision of flexible working by the employer on the ability of couples' to coordinate time together. The BHPS contains rich information about individuals and the households they belong to, including details of individuals' labour market experiences and use of flexible work. In its 13th wave in 2003, the BHPS introduced a novel set of questions about work timing which, to our knowledge, have never been exploited before. We will use regression methods to estimate the effect of flexible work on the potential time that couples can spend together by coordinating their work schedules (synchronous time). We will also address the possible endogeneity of flexible work: if couples actively seek out flexible jobs in order to spend more time together then finding a positive association between flexible work arrangements and synchronous time may simply mean that couples who prefer to spend more time together are also the ones seeking more flexible working conditions, as opposed to more flexible working conditions "causing" couples to spend more time together. Thus, inferring any causal mechanism from simple correlations between flexible working arrangements and the time couples spend together would lead to false conclusions about the effectiveness of any policy measure aimed at increasing the flexibility in the work place. We will use Instrumental Variables (IV) methods to estimate causal effects, constructing instruments from the detailed employment histories in the BHPS.The policy relevance of this research is clear. Although the proportion of workplaces offering flexible (or 'family-friendly') work arrangements has increased in recent years (Whitehouse et al, 2007), households still face enormous constraints which prevent them from coordinating as much as they wish. Around 40% of workers are not working their desired number of hours (Bryan, 2007). Given the Government's interest in promoting flexible jobs, this study will add to the body or work on work-life balance by being the first study, to our knowledge, to assess the impact of flexible working on couples' coordination of their work time. By identifying the groups who stand to benefit most from workplace flexibility, it will assist in targeting the promotion of work-life balance policies