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How Satisfied are Spouses with their Leisure Time? Evidence from Europe

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Abstract

This paper first identifies the determinants of spouses’ satisfaction levels within the household with respect to their leisure time and, secondly, characterizes whether their preferences have some degree of altruistic or egoistic character in regard to this particular satisfaction. To that end, it formulates a theoretical framework from the collective family model whose stochastic formulations are estimated for 14 EU countries. The general empirical results first reveal that the presence of children has a significantly negative impact on the leisure satisfaction of both spouses. Then, increases in individual incomes lead to lower own leisure satisfaction levels. Both husbands and wives show egoistic behavior with respect to the labor and non-labor incomes (wage rate) of their respective spouses’ satisfaction levels.

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Notes

  1. A particular case of this general situation appears when preferences are egoistic; that is to say, where individual utility depends on the individual’s own income or leisure.

  2. Early attempts in the literature to account for the fact that households may consist of different individuals with their own preferences are those of Samuelson (1956) and Becker (1974a, 1974b). However, in both cases, the authors accepted the traditional approach: In the first case, through an aggregation utility function which is achieved by consensus among individuals; and, in the second, by assuming the utility function of a benevolent head of the family, who takes into account the preferences of all household members.

  3. As we said earlier, our objective is to study the sign of the total effects, without considering the different components into which these can be broken down.

  4. The ECHP is an extensive, sample-based panel survey in which the same households and individuals are interviewed annually. The data come from a standardized questionnaire and are designed to be cross-nationally comparable (Peracchi 2002).

  5. Given the ordinal nature of the dependent variable on individual satisfaction, an appropriate regression model would be an ordered probit. However, while the random-effects ordered probit model is available in standard statistical software packages (Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Van Praag 2003; Schwarze 2004; Winkelmann 2005), the fixed-effects ordered probit estimator is not. This is why the present paper uses as approximations both random-effects and fixed-effects regression models, which are perfectly comparable by using habitual tests (D’Ambrosio and Frick 2004; Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters 2004).

  6. The recent work by Baltagi et al. (2003) provides information on the suitability of the Hausman–Taylor procedure in a general framework, where panel data are available and some regressors are correlated with the individual effects.

  7. See, for details, Baltagi et al. (2003), Hausman and Taylor (1981) and Wooldridge (2002).

  8. The 8.0 version of Stata includes the Hausman–Taylor procedure and is used to obtain the estimates presented in this paper.

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Acknowledgements

First, the authors wish to express their thanks to Professor Xiao and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This paper was partially written while José Alberto Molina was Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics of the University of Warwick (UK), to which he would like to express his thanks for the hospitality and facilities provided. Finally, the authors would like to express their thanks for the financial support provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and FEDER (Projects SEC2002-01350 and SEJ2005-06522), the Government of Aragon (B168/2003) and by the BBVA Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economic Analysis, University of Zaragoza, Gran Vía 2, 50005, Zaragoza, Spain

    Inmaculada García, José Alberto Molina & María Navarro

  2. Institute for the Study of Labour, IZA, Bonn, Germany

    José Alberto Molina

  3. Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada (FEDEA), Madrid, Spain

    María Navarro

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  1. Inmaculada García
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  2. José Alberto Molina
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Correspondence to Inmaculada García.

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García, I., Molina, J.A. & Navarro, M. How Satisfied are Spouses with their Leisure Time? Evidence from Europe. J Fam Econ Iss 28, 546–565 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-007-9082-7

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