Marital Stability and the Allocation of Time: The Market Work, Housework, and Leisure of Married Couples

Melissa L. Koenig, U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA)

This paper uses both waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the impact of future marital stability on the current time allocation decisions of married couples. My analysis, in part, revisits Johnson and Skinner's (1986) finding that married women's labor supply increased with an increase in divorce probability. I examine the time allocated to market work, housework, and leisure by both spouses. The nine household tasks in the NSFH are grouped according to whether the task is viewed as traditionally-female, traditionally-male, or gender-neutral. The division of nonmarket time into housework and leisure components and the inclusion of men provide a more complete picture of the couple's response to changes in marital stability. The predicted divorce probability is obtained from the estimation of a reduced-form first-stage probit. The hours equations are estimated using a seemingly-unrelated regression specification and a fixed-effects specification, which controls for unobservable time-invariant characteristics.