The Effect of Commuting Time on Married Couples’Time Use

This paper analyzes the effects of changes in commuting time on the market and household labor supply of wives and their husbands. We use the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC), conducted by the Institute for Research on Household Economics, for the period 1994–2015. This is a unique panel survey compiling the daily time allocation of both wives and husbands. In addition, it includes information on work circumstances, which are important to estimate market labor hours, and on household characteristics and the number of family members, which are essential to consider the decision on housework. The panel dataset enables us to control for unobserved heterogeneity of individuals and households and clarify the causal impact of commuting time on time allocation within the family. The results of the analysis on dual income households show that an increase in own commuting time raises the market labor hours and decreases the housework hours both for a wife and the husband. In addition, an increase in one spouse’s commuting time decreases the spouse’s own market labor hours and increases their housework hours. Further estimation shows that wives’ market labor hours react to their own and their spouse’s commuting time more than their own housework hours, and that husbands’ market labor hours react to their own and their spouse’s commuting time more than wives’ market labor hours. This responsiveness in husbands’ time allocation is a recent phenomenon in Japanese families which was not observed in the 1990s. JEL Classification Codes: D13, J22, R41