Measuring Trends in Leisure: the Allocation of Time over Five Decades*

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we show that leisure for men increased by 6‒8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4‒8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. Alternatively, the “consumption equivalent” of the increase in leisure is valued at 8 to 9 percent of total 2003 U.S. consumption expenditures. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with lesseducated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing “inequality” in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete. JEL Codes: D12, D13, J22 Contact: [email protected] and [email protected]. We thank Susanto Basu, Gary Becker, Kathy Bradbury, Kerwin Charles, Raj Chetty, Steve Davis, Jordi Galí, Rueben Gronau, Dan Hamermesh, Chad Jones, Ellen McGrattan, Bruce Mayer, Kevin Murphy, Derek Neal, Valerie Ramey, Richard Rogerson, Frank Stafford, and seminar participants at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, the Cleveland Federal Reserve (NBER EFG/RSW meeting), the University of Rochester, the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Poverty Research Summer Institute, NBER Summer Institute in Labor Studies, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Boston College, Harvard, Wharton, and the University of Maryland. We thank Dan Reichgott for research assistance. Hurst would like to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston or the Federal Reserve System.