Choosing between his time and her time?

When adding up market work and non-market work, Danish men and women work about the same number of hours per day. While men do the major share of the market work, women do the major share of the non-market work. In this paper, we investigate the interaction between the different time use activities for Danish working couples. The analysis is based on the Danish Time Use Survey from 2001, which contains detailed time use information for both spouses. We analyse the time used by each spouse on market work and non-market work, taking the endogeneity of time regressors into account. Non-market work consists of both ordinary housework and childcare. We analyse whether these two activities are structurally different by estimating them separately and find strong evidence in favour of this hypothesis.
Results show that substitution between time use activities is found both for individuals and between spouses. This is especially the case for market work and housework, while childcare is different. Thus, when considering labour supply the total workload must be taken into account. Furthermore, the interdependence between the spouses’ working hours suggests that bargaining is taking place in the household.