Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35323 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 3823
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper analyzes the time allocation of Italian spouses to paid work, childcare and household work. The literature suggests that Italian husbands contribute the least to unpaid household work, relative to other European countries, while Italian women have the lowest market employment rates. We model the three different time uses simultaneously for the two spouses within each household, allowing for corner solutions and correlations in the unobservables across the system of six equations. To estimate the model we use data drawn from the 2002-03 Italian Time Use Survey, combined with earnings information taken from the 2002 Bank of Italy Survey. We conclude that Italian husbands' time allocation responds to their wife's attributes: in particular, husbands' housework time increases with the wage of their wife. On the contrary, the own wage effect is significantly negative for housework of women. Childcare time of fathers increases with own wage and with the presence of small children and this is true both for weekdays and weekends.
Subjects: 
Time allocation
work behaviour
household economics
JEL: 
D1
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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