The data for this study were obtained in October 1989 through the use of a 128-item questionnaire given to students attending an alternative high school in Ogden, Utah. The Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale was included as part of the questionnaire. A total of 166 usable questionnaires were received from the students. The objectives of this research were to determine if relationships between self-esteem, race, gender, and religion and time use could be detected in at-risk adolescents. The data collected indicate that self-esteem, religion, gender, and race have only slight significance upon the self-reported time use of the alternative high school student. The alternative high school students came from multiple economic and social backgrounds but were quite homogeneous in their perceptions about Sunday and in their activities on Sunday. Statistical significance was noted in the comparisons of self-esteem and gender to self-reported time use. Those students with high self-esteem viewed Sunday more as a day of little or no accomplishment than those with low self-esteem. Gender appears to influence how time is spent, as significant differences were found in the amount of TV watched by boys ad girls as well as in time spent goofing off and in preparing and eating meals. Comparisons between members of the two dominant religions, Catholicism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, produced no statistical significance regarding religion and Sunday self-reported time use. Comparisons between students of the two dominant races, Caucasian and Hispanic, produced no statistical significance regarding race and Sunday self-reported time use.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Most poverty studies ignore the dimension of time and are merely concerned if an individual meets certain money-metric or non-income welfare (e.g., access to services and asset ownership) criteria. They fail to recognise the limited time (24hours per day) available to complete tasks and the added difficulties they have even though there is an abundance of money-metric and asset-related non-money-metric poverty studies. (Kim et al. 2014:1). For example, individuals/households deemed poor by standard measures cannot afford market alternatives to assist them with non-market work (like childcare). Therefore, they find themselves spending all their time in market and non-market work without taking time for rest and improving themselves. Recognising non-market work and the allocation of time allows for a greater understanding into the role of women and Africans whose non-market work are unrecognised by standard economic measures such as GDP (Ferrant 2014:1). There are also only a few in-depth studies on time poverty, but they fail to utilise the most current data. Therefore, this study seeks to provide insights into how household production impacts on South African welfare. It explores the income, time poor and the extent of time allocation differences for various personal characteristics. It estimates the likelihood of time poverty based on an individual’s time schedule and the factors which most likely results in time poverty. In this study, various time concepts and measures were explored adding to the scarcely found South African time poverty studies which lack in-depth exploration. At the same time the study highlighted household production, an aspect closely linked to time poverty which affects certain groups of people more (females and Africans), and its welfare implications completely ignored by standard measures of the economy. The study also aimed to examine the relationship between time and income poverty. The study utilised the 2000 and 2010 South African Time Use Survey data by focusing on two main themes: time use patterns (to better understand household production) and time poverty (to measure it and understands its relationship with income poverty). The descriptive results revealed that both mean SNA (System of National Accounts internationally agreed standard for production)) and non-SNA production time increased over time at the cost of the non-productive time. Also, mean paid and unpaid work increased over time.

No description available.

This dissertation consists of three essays on women empowerment in Iran. In the first two chapters, we examine the impact of the rapid expansion of electricity to rural areas of Iran after the 1979 revolution on two important determinants of women's empowerment, fertility and female literacy. We use the timing of provision of electricity to villages to identify its impact on the child-woman ratio and the literacy rate of adult women and men. We use difference-in-differences (DID) method as well as instrumental variables (IV) to account for the potential endogeneity of electrification. Our findings for the impact of electricity on fertility is highly sensitive to the method of identification. The DID results imply that electrification lowers fertility whereas the IV estimates suggest the opposite. The results on literacy are consistent across estimation methods, both showing that electrification increases female literacy. In the third chapter, we focus on the role of education in the empowerment of women. The positive effects of education on female empowerment through lower fertility and greater labor force participation are well known. Female empowerment is also closely identified with greater participation in market work and access to an independent source of income. In the past two decades Iranian women have increased their education, lowered their fertility, but their labor force participation remains low. In this chapter we examine the role of education in the empowerment of Iranian women through their allocation of time between domestic work, child education, and market work. We find evidence that more educated women spend more time in market related activities and child education, but less in domestic work. The behavior of women in time allocation to market work and childcare exhibits similar patterns and both are quite different from house or domestic work. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that education empowers women by increasing their ability to earn more income as well as through their ability to invest in the education of their children. / Ph. D.

This thesis examines how patterns of time use change in later life and how the way in which older people use their time is related to well-being. Arguing that maintaining balance in time use concerns not only people of working age but matters for people of all ages, we propose an alternative theoretical framework of life balance. This consists of two conceptual models: The Life Balance Triangle and Multidimensional Life Balance (MLB). Using UK time use data, the thesis demonstrates the empirical applicability of these two models in enhancing our understanding of older people's daily lives. The life balance model, which we built by modifying the theoretical categorisation of time use by Ås (1978) and the work-leisure triangle of Gershuny (2003), identifies and presents alteration in time use across the life course as changes in balance between constraints (committed time) and freedom of choice (discretionary time), controlling for time spent on biological/physiological maintenance (regenerative time). We find the balance shifts towards greater discretionary, and less committed, time in later life, with a significant gender gap. Life stage, which reflects social structure and expectations, rather than biological ageing, was found to be the most influential factor for life balance dynamics. Findings suggest that men may find it more difficult to adjust to life beyond work because of abrupt and greater changes in life balance, which may disrupt their daily time structure. The multidimensional life balance model challenges the assumption of a linear relationship between the level of activity and well-being of older people. Adapting the Alkire-Foster method (Alkire and Foster, 2011), we propose a threshold-based approach that takes the heterogeneity of older people and multidimensionality of daily life into account, and emphasises overall balance in the level of activities across various activity domains. Results show MLB is associated positively with better self-assessed health, suggesting a threshold effect. We also identify the demographic/socio-economic groups more likely to lack MLB, as well as domains in which most people are deficient. The thesis contributes to work-life balance research by moving beyond paid-work centrality, and to ageing research by providing a multidimensional approach to activities and well-being in later life.

This study investigated the practices, perceptions, and time expenditures of post-secondary instructors in American institutions as they prepared for, taught, and reflected on the tasks involved in teaching a one-semester course. The participants either taught in a traditional face-to-face setting or in an all-online context. This study compares and contrasts the experiences of the participants. Although research in the business field includes models for improving productivity, the world of education rarely looks at these subjects, especially in the context of what leads to a successful course. The few studies there have been on similar topics in education have generally failed to provide consensus on amount of time the delivery of an online course requires and on the factors that contribute to that time difference. A clear trend in higher education is the growing use of instructional technology tools that can help instructors meet the needs of students and facilitate the teaching process. However, these changes also bring about challenges for faculty, challenges that must be examined, understood, and addressed in order to ensure the best possible learning environment for everyone involved. This study was designed to examine faculty teaching practices and gain insight into the experiences of faculty teaching classroom-based courses and faculty teaching online or Web-based courses. A qualitative, case study approach was used to conduct an in-depth investigation that focused on the tools and methods that faculty members employ to help them optimize the time they devote to course activities. The study also revealed a set of good practices used by these faculty members. Data included semi-structured interviews, faculty profile questionnaires, and teaching journals. Findings revealed that faculty teaching online recorded an average of one hour per week more on their courses than did faculty teaching in the classroom. There was minimal difference in time commitment between online and classroom-based faculty participants when considering factors such as gender, type of higher education institution, and experience level. Overall, perceptions of faculty workload averaged three hours more than the actual time recorded during the journaling phase of the study, with all of the face-to-face instructors perceiving that they would work more hours than they actually logged on their journals. Only half of the online instructors perceived that they would work more hours than they actually logged. Significant issues brought to light for faculty in both delivery formats included (1) lack of adequate or sufficient preparation for teaching, (2) limited availability of faculty training, and (3) lack of sufficient time to teach. The study also revealed the variation of instructional strategies used for comparison, and a set of common good practices that apply to both online and face-to-face courses. / text

This study attempted to determine the amount of time spent on nonpaid daily activities by retired people and to identify management problems encountered while performing daily activities. Time use data were collected by daily records completed by the subjects. Variables examined were age, sex, health, education, level of income, and living arrangements. Age and sex were related to total time spent on household activities and family care. Those in the oldest age group spent the least amount of time on household activities and family care and men spent less time than women on these activities. Health, living arrangements, income, and transportation were identified as management problems. These problems were not incapacitating and most elderly were able to live independently at home.

This thesis studies the dynamics of parents’ time with children. It uses self-reported time diary data to empirically document discrepancies between high- and low-educated parents’ time spent in various childcare activities. By doing so, the study considers one important but under-researched form of childhood inequality, namely inequality in parental time investment. The thesis is among the first to provide an extensive and detailed empirical documentation of variations in parents’ time use with children and to examine the effect of macro-structure and policy context on parenting behaviour. Using the American Time Use Survey (2003-2008), the thesis first investigates variations in parents’ time spent in different types of childcare among white parents in the US. Then, the American Heritage Time Use Survey (1965-2010) is employed to examine whether differences between high-and low-educated parents’ time spent with children have been growing or diminishing over time. Finally, the Multinational Time Use Survey (1965-2008) is used to explore the relationship between specific policies, macro-economic structure and childcare across time and across countries. The results can be summarized as follows. High-educated parents provide more primary childcare for their children compared to low-educated parents. The difference is particularly acute during the early years of childhood, and the gap is particularly wide for childcare activities which are fundamentally important for the social and cognitive development of children. This parental investment gap, most notably between high-and low-educated mothers, has been widening in the US. The main source of this widening phenomenon is the steady increase in high-educated mothers’ time spent in interactive and developmental childcare activities, rather than in routine and physical childcare activities. The analysis of cross-national data shows that the strong positive effect of education on childcare is a cross-national occurrence. However, the strength of this association varies considerably across time and across countries: universal paid leave for mothers and a gender egalitarian labour market structure help alleviate the education and gender gap in childcare. Mothers provide more primary childcare as the number of available paid leave weeks increases, while fathers increase their contribution to primary childcare as the percentage of women in the labour market increases. The provision of paid leave for mothers decreases the effect of education on primary childcare, and specific family policies as well as gender egalitarian socio-economic contexts can help alleviate inequalities in parental time investment in children.

Time use dependent on presence of children in household for generation 40s to 70s of the 20th century in the United States of America Abstract: The fertility of women has declined under reproduction level 2.1 children per women in economic developed countries during the last few decades. At the same time the employment of women has risen and time use has changed. Main aim of this thesis is to understand how generations born in 1940-1979 living in the USA changed the spending of their time. The AHTUS data set is analysed by comparing averages of times spent by total work, paid work, unpaid work and child care. The time spent by total work declined between generations born at 40s and 70s. Average time spent by paid work declined too. The men's average time spent by unpaid work increased and women's average time decreased. In spite of fertility decrease between 40s and 70s generations, the women's and men's time spent by childcare extremely increased. The men's time spent by child care increased five times, while women's time spent by child care increased more than three times. The rise of time spent by child care is realized by increasing in primary and secondary activities. Primary activities contain time spent by childcare, secondary activities include all activities where childcare was declared e as a...

Thesis advisor: Sanjay K. Chugh / Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli / My doctoral research focuses on the role of labor market frictions in shaping macroeconomic outcomes. I am currently pursuing three main lines of research that constitute the three chapters of this dissertation. The first chapter focuses on involuntary part-time employment as an additional margin used by firms to adjust to business cycle fluctuations. The chapter documents empirical regularities of involuntary part-time employment in the U.S. and furnishes a tractable analytical framework for studying this phenomenon that has gained so much attention in the years that followed the Great Recession. In the second chapter, which is joint work with Sanjay Chugh, Ryan Chahrour and Alan Finkelstein-Shapiro, we study the labor market wedge in the context of a search and matching model to understand how static and dynamic inefficiencies change over the business cycle. Measuring the labor market wedge and understanding its sources of movement is of great importance from a macroeconomic point of view, as existing research shows it holds a prominent place in explaining fluctuations in aggregate output. Finally, in the third chapter I study empirically the determinants of the job finding probability, a key object in the context of frictional labor markets. More specifically, I analyze how decisions on time allocation by the unemployed affect their chances of finding a job, and identify the activities that make more likely for an unemployed individual to receive and accept a job offer. Chapter 1. In recent years researchers and policymakers have shown renewed interest in involuntary part-time employment as a crucial indicator of labor market health. The fact that individuals have part-time jobs even though they would be willing to work more hours is evidence that resources in the economy are not employed at full capacity. This group represents almost 40 percent of total underemployment. Despite its large size and importance to policy-makers, surprisingly little literature addresses the empirical regularities or economic role this margin plays in determining labor market outcomes. In "Underemployment and the Business Cycle" I address several questions regarding involuntary part-time employment. First, how does involuntary part-time employment differ from the standard extensive and intensive margins? Second, what factors influence the choice of firms to use involuntary part-time workers? Third, how might economic policy contribute to the existence of involuntary part-time employment in the economy? And, fourth, have there been any changes over time in the response of involuntary part-time employment to changes in aggregate economic conditions and, if so, what explains them? To describe the empirical regularities of involuntary part-time employment, I use detailed micro-level data from longitudinally-linked monthly files of the Current Population Survey. A novel finding that emerges from the analysis of this dataset is that wages of involuntary part-time workers display higher volatility and lower persistence than those of their full-time counterparts, thus indicating a higher degree of flexibility. In addition, I find that changes in involuntary part-time employment are mostly explained by reallocation of workers from full-time to part-time positions within the firm, which involves more than just a mere reduction in hours worked. I then aggregate the data and compute business cycle statistics. Surprisingly, I find that the behavior of involuntary part-time employment resembles the behavior of unemployment more than the one of full-time employment. In fact, the results indicate that involuntary part-time employment is very volatile and strongly countercyclical. To understand the evidence I find at the micro and macro levels, I build an augmented search and matching model of the labor market featuring full-time and part-time employment, and a production function that combines both types of workers. The decision of whether a worker is full-time or part-time is made entirely by the firm, depending on the realizations of both aggregate and idiosyncratic productivity processes. The model is able to deliver the countercyclicality of involuntary part-time employment found in the data. The key mechanism to obtain this result is the relatively higher flexibility of part-time contracts that makes it more profitable for the firm to reallocate workers from full-time to part-time arrangements during recessions. Based on the model that captures key empirical facts, I conduct policy analysis to evaluate the effect of an increase in the cost of health insurance on involuntary part-time employment. The policy experiment predicts that an increase in the cost of health insurance provided by the firm to its full-time workers, such that their share in average full-time wages goes up by 1 percentage point, leads to an increase of steady state involuntary part-time employment by 10 percent, which nowadays would be equivalent to half a million additional involuntary part-time workers. I find evidence that involuntary part-time employment has become more volatile and persistent in the last 25 years. I study the impact that innovation in workforce management practices, a process that started in the 1990s and that has increased the degree of substitutability between full-time and part-time workers, may have had in changing the response over time of involuntary part-time employment to business cycle fluctuations. Impulse response analysis from the model indicates that an increase in the degree of substitutability makes involuntary part-time employment more sensitive to aggregate productivity shocks. Chapter 2. In "The Labor Wedge: A Search and Matching Perspective" we define and quantify static and dynamic labor market wedges in a search and matching model with endogenous labor force participation. Existing literature has generally centered on Walrasian labor markets in characterizing the inefficiencies, or ``gaps'', between labor demand and labor supply. However, given the conventional view in the profession that the matching process plays an important role in the labor market, the neoclassically-measured labor wedge suffers from a misspecification problem as it ignores the role of long-lasting relationships in explaining the cyclical pattern of the labor wedge. To construct the wedge we use a rigorously defined transformation function of the economy, which contains both the matching technology and the neoclassical production technology. Both technologies are primitives of the economy in the sense that a Social Planner must respect both processes. Given the model-appropriate transformation frontier and the household's static and dynamic marginal rates of substitution, we use data on the labor force participation rate, the employment rate, the vacancy rate, real consumption, real government spending, and real GDP to construct static and dynamic labor wedges. We find that, in a version of the model where all employment relationships turn over every period, the static labor wedge is countercyclical, a result that is consistent with existing literature. Once we consider long-lasting employment relationships, we can measure both static and dynamic wedges separately. We then find that, while the static wedge continues to be countercyclical, the dynamic (or intertemporal) wedge is procyclical. Since the latter is associated with the vacancy-posting decision of the firm, this result suggests that understanding the behavior of labor demand may be crucial to explaining the dynamic wedge. Our focus so far has been on obtaining a quantitative measure of both the static and dynamic wedges, and on analyzing their business cycle properties. Now we are working on extending this framework to provide a micro-founded explanation of the forces that could be driving the cyclical movements of the wedges. Chapter 3. Recent research has found that individuals who become unemployed allocate most of their forgone working hours into leisure rather than increasing the time devoted to job search activities. What is the rationale behind this decision? There are many factors that may affect the job search behavior of the unemployed. However, in this study I focus on a particular channel: the decision on how unemployed individuals allocate their time could be biased towards activities that increase their probability of finding a job. They might find more valuable to increase their social activities rather than looking formally for a job because this enhances their network, which could increase their chances of finding a job, even with less search effort. In "The Time Use Decisions of the Unemployed: A Survival Analysis", I conduct a duration analysis to estimate the effect of different time use allocations on the unemployment hazard rate using time use data from the Survey of Unemployed Workers in New Jersey. Defining "finding a job" as a failure, I estimate a single-spell, discrete-time duration model of unemployment with time-varying covariates using semi-parametric techniques. Given that I work with interval-censored data, I conduct the analysis using discrete time survival analysis techniques. The results indicate that education/training activities have a significant and positive impact on the hazard rate, i.e. they increase the probability that an unemployed worker finds a job, while leisure has the opposite effect. Furthermore, neither job-search nor networking have a significant effect on the hazard rate in the baseline specification. However, this result changes when incorporating into the regression interaction terms of these variables with a dummy that takes the value one if the individual is a long-term unemployed and zero otherwise. In this case, the coefficient associated with networking becomes positive and significant, while the coefficient of the interaction term is negative. This implies that networking has a positive effect on the hazard rate for short unemployment spells, but this effect weakens if the individual has been unemployed for a longer period. On the other hand, even after incorporating the interaction term, job search remains insignificant. These findings shed light on why individuals may not want to devote additional time to formal job search: it does not pay off with a higher likelihood of receiving a job offer, regardless of the length of the unemployment spell. On the other hand, other activities, such as investing in education or networking, are positively related to the probability of finding a job -- at least for short unemployment spells -- and thus it makes more sense for these individuals to devote more time to them.