Home Production with Time to Consume

Home Production Meets Time-to-build

An innovation in this paper is to introduce a time-to-build technology for the production of market capital into a model with home production. Our main finding is that the two anomalies that have plagued all household production models—the positive correlation between business and household investment, and household investment leading business investment over the business cycle—are resolved whe...

Is Mothers’ Time With Their Children Home Production or Leisure?

Is Mothers’ Time With Their Children Home Production or Leisure? As mothers have increased their paid work efforts, conflicts between employment and family responsibilities have grown. This evolution has led researchers to explore more fully the role that caregiving responsibilities play in mothers’ time choices. We study this issue using data from the 2003 American Time Use Survey. We estimate...

Is Mothers’ Time With Their Children Home Production Time or Leisure?

Home Production Technology and Time Allocation: Empirics, Theory, and Implications

We document a set of time use patterns in both time series and cross sections. To explain these facts, we propose and estimate a model of time allocation that emphasizes the role of home production technology. We find it necessary to consider both labor-augmenting technology and total factor productivity in home production. Based on the estimated model, we study the effects of proportional tax ...

Learning to Consume: Individual versus Social Learning

Obtaining the “exact” solution to the consumption-under-uncertainty problem can be an extraordinarily difficult mathematical problem. Allen and Carroll (2001), however, show that a simple linear approximation to the optimal policy rule can yield utility trivially close to that of the exact solution. Furthermore, Allen and Carroll show that consumers can consistently find the near-optimal approx...