Using the 2015 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data set, I estimate a collective model of family time allocation decisions. Traditional theories explain that higher education leads to less housework. However, in the data set, we see that more educated husbands take a higher share of the housework than less educated husbands, which has never been explained by the existing literature. I develop a theoretical model to examine how a husband's education affects his time at home and analyze the impact of education on the husband's housework time. My structural estimation results reveal that husbands' education elasticity of home productivity is greater than that of market productivity and even wives' education elasticity of domestic productivity. I find that the husband decreases his leisure time and increases time spent on housework and market labor as his educational attainment level increases. This fits well with the data.
Education and Time Allocation within Marriage:
The Education Effect in the Case of U.S., Spain, and Korea
I assess the education effect on the time use behavior of spouses in a given household using three data sets: the 2015 Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the U.S., the 2009 Time Use Survey of Spain and the 2014 Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families. Interestingly, husbands' housework time in the U.S., Spain, and Korea all show similar patterns. Well-educated husbands participate more in housework than less-educated husbands in recent years, and this observation holds across different cultural contexts. Considering the social and cultural differences between these countries, I suggest that this phenomenon results from economic decisions or rationality. This paper provides a theoretical framework to examine this phenomenon. By using the fractional response model, I analyze the impact of education on the husbands' housework time in these three different countries and support the theoretical framework.