Has leisure increased over the last century? Standard measures of hours worked suggest that it has. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive measure of non-leisure hours that includes market work, home production, commuting and schooling for the last 105 years. We also present empirical and theoretical arguments for a definition of %u201Cper capita%u201D that encompasses the entire population. The new measures reveal a number of interesting 20th Century trends. First, 70 percent of the decline in hours worked has been offset by an increase in hours spent in school. Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, average hours spent in home production are actually slightly higher now than they were in the early part of the 20th Century. Finally, leisure per capita is approximately the same now as it was in 1900.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
12264.
Length: Date of creation: May 2006 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12264
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Find related papers by JEL classification: E2 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment N1 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Growth and Fluctuations N3 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Income, and Wealth
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Jeremy Greenwood & Ananth Seshadri & Mehmet Yorukoglu, 2003.
"Engines of Liberation,"
RCER Working Papers
503, University of Rochester - Center for Economic Research (RCER).
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