The Chore Wars

Leora Friedberg, University of Virginia
Anthony Webb, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College

Abstract

Stress over the use of time is a hallmark of American life today. We analyze the role of bargaining in explaining how spouses divide up leisure and chores. Unlike many other outcomes of household decision-making, time use is easy to observe and assign using data from the new American Time Use Survey. The ATUS also provides a measure of the hourly wage, which is superior as a proxy for bargaining power to total earnings, used in many other studies of bargaining. We estimate the effect of a spouse’s relative wages on time use during the weekend, when substitution effects of wages should be small, and controlling for household income to deal with income effects of wages. We undertake several strategies to isolate the impact of bargaining from that of specialization. In our estimation, we find significant and moderate effects on a few specific activities, including watching television and cleaning the house, and important effects on the time that individuals spend with their families, with higher relative wages reducing men’s time and raising women’s time with both spouse and children. However, the effects of relative wages, and hence bargaining, on overall time use appear to be quite small. This finding of minor effects implies either that wages have little effect on bargaining power; that bargaining has little effect on time use; or that the impact of wages on bargaining power is cancelled out by their impact on preferences and productivity related to time use. We note some evidence in favor of the first and second explanations.