By
Kathy G.
Lots of great posts here, but not a single really wonky one since Friday. Being that this is Ezra’s blog, that’s a state of affairs bordering on scandalous. So I thought I’d write about an important new study on trends in leisure time in the U.S. Last month Ezra wrote an article lamenting the fact that the U.S. is the only advanced economy in the world that doesn’t guarantee its workers any vacation. That led to a discussion in the comments thread about whether Americans have more or less leisure time than they used to. I strongly implied that we have less (partly because of a well-known book from the 90s that argued this). Well, I was wrong -- it turns out that on average Americans today have significantly more leisure than they did 40 years ago. However, there is growing inequality in leisure, with less educated workers having significantly more leisure time than their more educated counterparts. I’ll explain. The study, which is by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, appears in the current Journal of Quarterly Economics Quarterly Journal of Economics. You can find a newspaper article on the study here. The journal the study was published in is subscription-only, but I’d be happy to email a copy to anyone who requests one. Detailed study results after the jump.
