Timing and Time Use

本“基于成就的更新”中描述的项目考察了活动时间安排的经济学问题，从而扩展了PI早期对市场工作时间安排的研究。人类的每一项活动都附有一个指标，说明活动发生的时间、消耗的量和完成的地点。从时间价值、婚姻状况和生命周期阶段的差异可以预测，时间在个人之间和国际之间会有所不同。这一观察结果导致建立一些模型，以审查下列事项：“开办”费用的作用及其对活动发生率和持续时间的影响；“例行公事”的性质及其在个人和社会中的变化；婚姻分享的重要性和婚姻在活动时间方面的好处。在每种情况下，这种行为都改变了我们对家庭间经济福利差异的推断。该项目将使用来自美国和其他四个国家的时间预算数据，并在数据允许的情况下进行国际比较，分析这些和其他方面的时间安排。这些结果将提供有关活动时间的第一次人口统计统计。更重要的是，它们将允许在瞬时背景下测试关于时间使用的假设，而不是之前所有经验主义研究的综合背景。

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.