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The Increase in Leisure Inequality, 1965-2005

By Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst

AEI Press, June 2009

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Media Inquiries: Véronique Rodman
vrodman@aei.org 202.862.4870
Orders: 800.343.4499 or www.aei.org/books

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 24, 2009

Recent research shows that income inequality is increasing in the United States--particularly between well-educated and less-educated American workers. But income is not the sole measure of prosperity. The amount of leisure time Americans have is also crucial to our understanding of American well-being, changes in well-being over time, and differences in well-being among citizens. In The Increase in Leisure Inequality, 1965-2005 (AEI Press, 2009) Professors Mark Aguiar of the University of Rochester and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago use data spanning forty years and tens of thousands of survey respondents to examine trends in leisure inequality, providing a more complete picture of American well-being than would have been obtained by measuring income inequality alone.

Aguiar and Hurst explore two key questions about U.S. leisure inequality:

• Has leisure time, for the average American, increased or decreased over the last several decades? By how much?
• What changes in leisure time are seen between groups with different levels of education, and to what extent do educational differences in employment rates account for these changes? That is, if workers with relatively little education are less likely to be employed today than twenty years ago, does that explain an increase in their leisure relative to more-educated workers.

The authors find that from 1965 to 2005, leisure time increased by about four hours per week for the average American.

When the authors examined leisure inequality between less-educated and more-educated men, they found that the leisure gap between less-educated and more-educated men widened in 1985-2005, with leisure time increasing by eight hours for men with less than a high school education and decreasing by six hours for college-educated men.

To discover what trends are driving this growing "education leisure gap," Aguiar and Hurst raise the following questions:

Does the education leisure gap stem from differences in employment rates between less-educated and more-educated men? No. Less than half of the total increase in leisure inequality can be attributed to trends in employment rates in the two groups. Most of the growing leisure gap is voluntary--and not due to either increased involuntary unemployment or increased disability.

Could falling wages in the 1985–2005 period have discouraged less-educated workers from taking jobs despite their shrinking incomes? Because leisure also increased among non-employed workers during this period, and because leisure also rose from 1965 to 1985, when the wages of less-educated workers were rising, this explanation seems incomplete.

Did declining prices of some leisure goods, such as television, affect the relative amount of time spent in leisure by less-educated and more-educated men? Because prices decreases affected all groups, not only the less-educated, greater accessibility of leisure goods cannot directly account for the growing "education leisure gap."

Aguiar and Hurst suggest that a potential reason for the "education leisure gap" may be that less-educated individuals simply have a greater, and increasing, preference for leisure than their more-educated counterparts. If so, concerns over widening income disparities between less- and more-educated Americans may be exaggerated. Initiatives to narrow the income gap may, therefore, prove futile or even counterproductive.

Mark Aguiar is an associate professor of economics at the University of Rochester. He is a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and an associate editor for the Review of Economic Dynamics, and serves on the board of editors for the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.

Erik Hurst is the V. Duane Rath Professor of Economics and the Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1999. Professor Hurst serves as a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and is an associate editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.

EVENT INFORMATION

Mark Aguiar will discuss The Increase in Leisure Inequality, 1965-2005 on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 from 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. at AEI (1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., 12th floor Wohlstetter Conference Center, Washington, DC). More information can be found here: /files/2009/06/24/event/100073.

INTERVIEW REQUESTS:

For interview requests, please contact the authors directly. Mark Aguiar can be reached at mark.aguiar@rochester.edu (585.275.4196), and Erik Hurst at erik.hurst@chicagobooth.edu (773.834.4073). For all other media inquiries, please contact Véronique Rodman at vrodman@aei.org (202.862.4871) or Sara Huneke at sara.huneke@aei.org (202.862.4870).