Leisure, Home Production and Work--The Theory of The Allocation of Time Revisited

From the theoretical point of view, the justification for aggregating leisure and work at home into one entity, "non-market time" (or "home time") can rest on two assumptions: (a.) the two elements react similarly to changes in the socio-economic environment and, hence, nothing is gained by studying them separately, and (b.) the two elements satisfy the conditions of a composite input, i.e., their relative price is constant, and there is no interest in investigating the composition of this aggregate since it has no bearing on production and the price of the output. This study sets out to show that none of these assumptions holds. Recent time budget findings have established that work at home is affected differently by changes in socioeconomic variables than is leisure, and this paper shows that the aggregation is also suspect from the analytical point of view.