Mark Aguiar Erik Hurst Working Paper 12082 http://www.nber.org/papers/w12082 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 March 2006
We thank Susanto Basu, Gary Becker, Kathy Bradbury, Kerwin Charles, Raj Chetty, Steve Davis, Jordi Galí, Rueben Gronau, Dan Hamermesh, Chad Jones, Ellen McGrattan, Bruce Mayer, Kevin Murphy, Derek Neal, Valerie Ramey, Richard Rogerson, Frank Stafford, and seminar participants at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, the Cleveland Federal Reserve (NBER EFG/RSW meeting), the University of Rochester, the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Poverty Research Summer Institute, NBER Summer Institute in Labor Studies, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Boston College, Harvard, Wharton, and the University of Maryland. We thank Dan Reichgott for research assistance. Hurst would like to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston or the Federal Reserve System. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ©2006 by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.
Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst NBER Working Paper No. 12082 March 2006 JEL No. D12, D13, J22 ABSTRACT In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the