Time and Money - Are they Substitutes?

In this paper, we analyse the distribution of time and money for Danish wage earner couples, where time is defined as leisure time and money as extended income, i.e. the sum of disposable income and the value of housework. The hypothesis is that individuals being rich in one dimension are more likely to be poor in the other dimension, such that individuals can be classified as either money-poor/time-rich or money-rich/time-poor. We analyse two different distributions of income, where the first assumes no sharing and the second complete sharing of income between spouses. The data are from the Danish Time-Use Survey 2001, merged with register data. Results show that the substitution of money for time is more prominent for women than for men, because they have a larger income share of time-intensive value of housework, while men have the larger share of disposable income. Furthermore, when the spouses share income resources the women give up more value of housework than they get disposable income in return.