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

suggests that the safety net in the US may indeed be having some effect on power
considerations within the family.

Finally, we introduce alternative power measures based on marriage market
characteristics and norms. As discussed earlier, an alternative measure of marital power is the
ratio of men to women around the age at which partnerships are formed. For the US, we use
sex ratios for five year birth cohorts calculated for four geographic regions from Grossbard
and Amuedo-Dorantes (2007) updated with population estimates for the youngest cohorts.
For Denmark we use similar measures calculated separately for each birth year by region,
with the oldest five year cohort data calculated off somewhat more aggregated data. A higher
sex ratio implies there are more men than women in the respondent’s cohort. This implies
that women should have more and men less power, all else equal. Thus, Sex Ratio should be
positively associated with leisure time for women and negatively associated with leisure time
for men. In fact, Sex Ratio has a negative effect on leisure time for all but women on non-
work days in the US and is never statistically significant. Interestingly, Sex Ratio is generally
larger in Denmark (1.07 versus 1.01), which may help explain the weak Danish education-
based power measure as the higher sex ratio in Denmark suggests that women have more
power in Denmark than in the US.

None of these results allow us to distinguish between the impact of different
institutions versus the impact of different social norms in explaining the observed impact of
power on leisure time. To do so, we construct measures of social and individual norms. We
would like to have information on each respondent’s perception of the gendered nature of
tasks, but such information is unavailable in either data set. Instead we use information on
women’s labor force participation rates over time and by geographical area. Social norms are

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