Market Wages, The Price of Childcare and Mothers’ Time Allocation in China

Using CHNS dataset from the 2004 to 2009, we will study time choices by mothers who have children aged below 6 years old. We estimate a five-equation system in which the dependent variables are the minutes used in home production, active leisure, market work, child care-giving and sleeping. The results based on the pooled individual observations suggest that childcare is distinct from both leisure and home production, and should be considered separately when doing the time allocation research of mothers. With women’ own wage increases, employment minutes are increased while all the other four time patterns were decreased, assuming that the substitution effect is greater than the income effect. The trade-off between employment time and childcare time is larger than the trade-off among employment, home-production and leisure. Informal childcare substitution, such as female elders who lived closely, shows more substantial impact on mothers’ time allocation than the formal ones. Besides, sleeping time of new mothers will also react to the wages and the childcare substitutions and should be considered when doing time research.