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



We hypothesized that more egalitarian values and a more generous social welfare
system would weaken the influence of individual „power’ as measured by potential economic
contributions to the household within Danish as compared to American couple households.
We employ a measure of relative education to capture power. This measure is available for
everyone in the sample rather than just for labor force participants, does not change
dramatically over the course of the lifetime, and does not already subsume a particular level
of labor supply - unlike the measures of relative earnings or relative wages that have typically
been used in this literature. While most research on intrahousehold power focuses on the
allocation of housework time, we also hypothesized that power considerations would have a
more clear-cut impact on the allocation of discretionary leisure time. Time spent on
housework is more likely to be influenced by preferences regarding household goods and by
gender-based notions of activities. Housework time is also more likely to be censored below
at zero, which could bias estimation results.

We estimate separate OLS models of leisure and housework time by country, gender,
and work day type. We find substantial evidence to support our hypothesis that economic
power is a more closely associated with leisure time allocation than with housework time
allocation. Power is individually significant in only one of eight baseline specifications of our
housework time model as compared with three of eight of our leisure time models and power
is never a statistically significant determinant of housework in our larger (and less egalitarian)
US samples. The sign of the estimated impact also differs considerably more in the
housework than in the leisure time specifications. Overall, this suggests that researchers
interested in intrahousehold power concerns should focus more on how households allocate
leisure time than how they allocate housework time.

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