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



Of course, the variable of particular interest here and for which we predict a
differential effect is power. We find that power as measured by relative education level is
positively associated with leisure time in all cases in the US, significantly so for both men and
women on non-work days. While power is positively associated with leisure time on non-
work days in Denmark, the relation is significant only for women and there is a negative
association on work days. These power measures are jointly significant in the US at the 1%
level. In Denmark, they are not jointly significant at even the 25% level. This result is as we
hypothesized: „power’ has a greater impact on the allocation of leisure time in the US than it
does in the more egalitarian welfare state of Denmark. It is of some note, furthermore, that
the effect of power is greatest on non-work days. This may be because there is less time over
which to negotiate on work days.

We further explore this result by examining the impact of power as measured by
relative education on both leisure time and housework time for different subsamples of the
data. Only the estimated coefficients to power from these runs are reported in Table 3. Full
sample results are available on request. The initial row repeats the results for the power
variable reported in Table 2.

The full sample results for housework time indicate a negative association with power
in three out of four cases from each country. The relation is consistently negative only for
men and significant only for Danish men on non-work days. It may be that women prefer
household goods more than men and that this preference results in more powerful women
spending more time on housework. These results support our hypothesis that power has a
„cleaner’ predicted impact on leisure time than on housework time where preferences for the
public good may obscure the relation.

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