Income Distribution, Weekly Hours of Work, and Time for Child Rearing: The U.S. Experience in a Cross-National Context

This article uses microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study to assess income distributions, weekly work hours, and time for childrearing in seven rich countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Focusing on the U.S. in comparative perspective, we first assess the relationships among income inequality, earnings inequality, and the distribution of working time. We supplement these analyses by considering potential time available to parents to care for children. We find that although Americans tend to work longer hours (unconditioned on employment) than Canadians and Western Europeans at both the top and bottom of the income distribution, the proportional differences are greatest at the bottom of the distribution. This means that Americans at the bottom of the income distribution spend more time working for pay than do their counterparts in a number of other rich countries. But, nonetheless, they achieve a relative standard of living below that enjoyed by working-age adults (in other countries) who hold the same position in their national income distributions. Likewise, the amount of parental time potentially available for child care is more limited in the United States, overall, than it is in the other six countries included in this study.