Who Absorbs a School Day? School Schedules and Household Time Allocation

When a school day disappears, who absorbs it? This paper observes the complete same-day time accounts of children and both parents around Japan's transition to a five-day school week. Under the biweekly regime of 2001, the national time-use survey administratively assigned households to adjacent school and no-school Saturdays, shifting attendance by 40 percentage points; the identical calendar positions in 2006 provide a placebo after the full abolition of Saturday classes in 2002. Mothers' daily market work is a precise zero: equivalence tests reject effects larger than 11 minutes, or 0.06 of a control standard deviation. Children aged ten and older absorb the half-day instead-a child induced to attend loses 58 minutes of sleep, along with television and family time-while fathers work about 25 minutes more. Prefecture-level reduced forms scale with the local first stage while intercepts are indistinguishable from zero, consistent with an attendance channel. After abolition, the baseline comparison shows mothers' Saturday participation falling 4.1 percentage points relative to women aged 25-59 without coresident children under 16; exact age standardization leaves a similar 3.3-point reform-interval estimate with lower precision. School childcare is capitalized into standing arrangements that adjust over longer horizons rather than expressed through mothers' day-to-day labor supply.