Flexible Working and Couples' Coordination of Time Schedules

这个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。我们还将研究有孩子和没有孩子的家庭以及不同的工作安排(双重全职和兼职/全职)是否会产生明显的影响。这些发现将加深我们对劳动力市场限制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，它将扩展有关弹性工作的新兴文献，考察劳动力市场限制夫妇在一起的时间作为家庭幸福的一个维度的重要性，而不是像以前的研究那样仅仅是个人幸福。其次，它将纳入市场工作的时间安排，而不是投入市场工作的总时间。很少有实证研究关注工作的时间(Connelly和Kimmel，2007；Rapoport和Le Bourdais，2008；Presser，1994；Paley，2006)，而且只有一项研究模拟了个人在一天中的不同时间工作或不工作的选择(Hameresh，1999)。第三，我们将超越文献，不仅描述家庭同步的模式(Hameresh，2002；Jenkins and 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。该项目将使用来自英国家庭小组调查(BHPS)的关于时间安排的创新和以前未被利用的数据来调查雇主提供灵活工作对夫妻在一起协调时间的能力的影响。BHPS包含关于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详细信息。在2003年的第13次浪潮中，BHPS引入了一组关于工作时间的新颖问题，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弹性工作对夫妻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。我们还将探讨弹性工作的可能内生性：如果夫妻为了花更多的时间在一起而积极寻找弹性工作，那么发现弹性工作安排和同步时间之间的正相关可能仅仅意味着，喜欢花更多时间在一起的夫妇也是那些寻求更灵活的工作条件的人，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，根据弹性工作安排和夫妻在一起的时间之间的简单关联来推断任何因果机制，将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)方法来估计因果效应，根据BHP的详细就业历史构建工具。本研究的政策相关性很明显。尽管近年来提供灵活(或“家庭友好”)工作安排的工作场所的比例有所增加(Whitehouse等人，2007年)，但家庭仍然面临着巨大的限制，使他们无法按照自己的意愿进行协调。大约40%的员工没有达到预期的工作时长(Bryan，2007)。鉴于政府对促进弹性工作的兴趣，这项研究将通过我们所知的第一项研究，评估弹性工作对夫妻协调工作时间的影响，从而增加机构或工作对工作与生活平衡的影响。通过确定从工作场所灵活性中受益最大的群体，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