Institutions, Social Norms, and Bargaining Power: An Analysis of Individual Leisure Time in Couple Households

Given the substantially different time constraints observed between work days and
non-work days and between men and women in terms of time use, we model time use
separately by gender and day of week, and of course by country. Following Burda,
Hamermesh, and Weil (2007), we distinguish between time spent in activities that are
necessary for life (henceforth designated tertiary activities) such as sleep and eating, and time
spent in more discretionary leisure activities (henceforth designated leisure) like reading,
watching TV, socializing, and volunteering. We expect that such discretionary leisure time is
likely to be more responsive to power considerations than the more typical measure of „all
time not spent in the market or on housework’ and therefore base our empirical analysis on
this definition of leisure. We also look at a similar specification for housework time. Our
chief hypotheses are: (1) power will be more consistently positively associated with leisure
time than it is negatively associated with housework time and (2) power will have a larger
effect in the US than in Denmark. Further analysis is conducted to determine how each
partner’s employment status, welfare eligibility, and individual and social norms affect the
results.

DATA

We use data from the 2001 Danish Time Use Survey (DTUS) and the 2003-2006
waves of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to investigate these hypotheses. The
Danish sample consists of a representative sample of the entire Danish adult population (16-
74 years) drawn from the administrative registers at Statistics Denmark. The American
sample derives from the Current Population Survey. We restrict our analysis to heterosexual
couples, between the ages of 20 and 60 inclusive, who live in households that do not include

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