Opting Out and Buying Out: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time.

ABSTRACT: It has been proposed that the negative association between wives' earnings and their time in housework is due to greater outsourcing of household labor by households with high-earning wives, but this hypothesis has not been tested directly. In a sample of dual-earner married couples in the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and Retirement Study (N = 796), use of market substitutes for women's housework was found to be only weakly associated with wives' time cooking and cleaning. Furthermore, expenditures on market substitutes explain less than 15% of the earnings-housework time relationship. This suggests that use of market substitutes plays a smaller role in explaining variation in wives' time in household labor than has previously been hypothesized.

SUBMITTER: Killewald A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3205086 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature