International Association for Research in Income and Wealth 33rd General Conference

Session 5 (plenary:) Time Use and Well-Being
Organizers:
Joachim Merz (University of Lueneburg, Germany) merz@uni-lueneburg.de
Paul Schreyer (OECD) Paul.Schreyer@oecd.org

Time affects individual well-being by enabling and restricting any activity. Information on time use is thus important for indicators of individual and a society’s well-being e.g. see the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi 2009 report).

The session will focus on time and profiles of time use as one of the determinants of well-being (in addition to e.g. income). The session will bring together time use profiles (with a family/household context) for paid and unpaid work, investment in human capital, social time, care giving, leisure and their implications for well-being (e.g. measured as satisfaction and/or other outcome measures). Thereby, time poverty and the relative prevalence of time use choices and time constraints constitute crucial issues.

On the micro side, new measures of well-being, inequality and distribution may be derived based on individual time use diary data that rely on novel approaches of asking the respondents for their time use. On the macro side, contributions on the use of aggregated time use data to enhance the traditional income and wealth approaches are welcomed.