Education and Home Production

Valuable insights into the labor supply of married women have recently been gained by analyzing the problem in the household production context. Pioneered by Jacob Mincer, this approach sees women as choosing not simply between work and leisure, but between work in the home, work in the market, and leisure. While income affects the total amount of work, its division between home and market depends on wage rates, productivity in the home, and the price and availability of substitutes for the wife's labor in the home. Participation of married women in the market has, of course, increased dramatically in the past thirty years; this increase in labor force participation has been accompanied by various changes in inputs and outputs of household work which have only recently come under detailed scrutiny. It appears that over a fifty-year period the total time devoted to work in the home by urban nonemployed women has remained virtually constant at fiftythree hours per week (Joann Vanek). But since employed women have always devoted less time to household production than nonemployed women, and since the proportion of women in the labor force has been rising, the average time devoted to household tasks by all women has been falling over the past fifty years. One of the factors drawing women into the labor market has been their rising educational attainment. But what is the effect of the considerable rise in schooling levels on production within the home? First, it is important to understand how home production varies with schooling. Michael Grossman has recently found that a married man's health is positively related to his wife's schooling level. Lee Benham finds evidence to support his hypothesis that the earnings of married men are positively related to their wives' schooling. Robert T. Michael finds that education affects the efficiency with which contraception is carried on. In contrast to these papers, which relate a woman's education to various household production outputs, the present paper will try to determine how schooling affects one of the inputs of household production, namely, time. Time budget data will be used to determine how time allocation to various activities varies with schooling level.