Content area
Full text
The large influx of women into the paid workforce observed in the past half century and the resulting work/family conundrum has been much discussed in the academic community and popular media. It is now well understood that both mothers and fathers spend substantial amounts of time each week in paid employment. What is less understood is how the timing of this paid work might affect both parents' allocation of time to various activities, including time devoted to caring for their children, time with each other, time devoted to leisure activities, and time spent in personal care. This paper examines in a rigorous way one item of the above list, the effect of the timing of paid work on a parent's time devoted to child caregiving.
We use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which provide single day time diaries for a large sample of Americans. The paper provides a descriptive assessment of parents' time use on weekdays by time of day and then proceeds to an econometric model of the role that the timing of paid work plays in the aggregate minutes of daily caregiving time. Of course, working standard versus non-standard hours is, in part, a choice, and thus we model the simultaneity of the time devoted to caregiving and the choice of employment schedule. The methodology we use is an endogenous switching regression, in which we estimate the probability of working non-standard hours simultaneously with the hours spent on child caregiving activities during the 24-hour diary day.
This research adds to the growing broad literature on the relationship between maternal employment and caregiving time, as well as the literature focused on non-standard work. Our contribution to the literature on non-standard work and caregiving is threefold. First, we consider the role played by substantial work outside the standard work day on caregiving choices, and once the data are stratified by non-standard work status, we show the importance of various demographic, spatial, and economic factors, most importantly, wages and childcare prices, in parental caregiving time choices. 1 Second, we examine the caregiving time choices of both mothers and fathers, while the existing literature focuses only on mothers. Third, we fully endogenize the work schedule choice via a Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML)...