American time use 1965-2003: the construction of a historical comparative file, and consideration of its usefulness in the construction of extended national accounts for the USA

This project was funded by the Glaser Progress Foundation, and forms part of a wider programme based at Yale University and directed by William Nordhaus. The project provided approximately £150,000 to support the production and testing of a harmonised cross-time comparative micro-level file of diary derived US time-use data, suitable inter alia for the production of extensions to the national accounts to cover household and other unpaid production of goods and services. The project has produced a new American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) which brings together major US national samples of time diary based studies from each decade sine the 1960s. The project undertook a sequence of carefully controlled and fully documented data production activities; a complete collection of syntax files, providing a trail of transformations from the original data to the AHTUS, will be made accessible over the web. The result is a 36000 case micro-data file covering the period 1965-2003, with 45 classificatory variables and a 90-category classification of time use. The AHTUS time use data is presented both in its original sequential format, and with totals of daily time in each of the 90 categories, and also estimates of “secondary” childcare. The majority of this report is devoted to the testing of the usefulness of subsets of the time use data for estimating the National Accounts extensions. Section 2 of the report provides a brief overview of the theoretical considerations that lie behind the use of time-diary data in the calculation of extended National Accounts, identifying six distinct spheres of unpaid product. Section 3 deals with the major context variables in the study, concluding that the weighted samples of days for each decade are close to CPS population estimates. Section 4 works systematically through time use evidence on each of the six spheres of unpaid economic activity, considering in particular the plausibility of the trends of change, for people in various age, gender, employment and family categories. Amongst the findings in the concluding section are: • Limitations in the sample coverage and differences in instrument design mean that the most detailed comparisons of non-money national product from household and similar production will be possible only for 1975 and 2003, but some useful results will be derived from each of the survey periods. • We strongly recommend a split-sample experiment to evaluate the effects of the different instruments used in the heritage and the BLS 2003 sample; we are particularly concerned to understand the very high levels of childcare in the latter. It will be desirable to make arrangements for continued maintenance and improvement of the AHTUS, and in particular, for adding subsequent BLS materials to the study. NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY This paper represents the first round of testing of a data set produced for the Glaser Progress Foundation to look at changes in total work performed in the United States. Total work includes both the work for which people are paid (and for which a wide range of national statistics are available) as well as the unpaid housework and care work which individuals and families undertake as part of the process of daily living. This analysis is limited to the working age population (people aged 19-64) as the first of the five studies included in the American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) created in this project only collected information from people in this age range. The paper mainly highlights areas for future research.