Time-Use and Subjective Well-Being: Is there a Preference for Activity Diversity?
Pre-print, Working paper: Using the American and the French time-use surveys, we examine whether people have a preference for a more diversified mix of activities, in the sense that, everything else equal, they experience a higher level of well-being when their agenda is multi-activity, rather than concentrated on a very small number of activities. This could be due to decreasing marginal utility, as is assumed for the consumption of goods, if each episode of time is conceived as yielding a certain level of utility per se. However, in the presence of returns to specialization, people would face a trade-off between the efficiency of specialization and the taste for diversity, as concerns time arrangements. We test these hypotheses and investigate potential gender differences with regard to these patterns.
Keywords JEL
Keywords
- Time allocation
- Time-use diversity
- Subjective well-being
- Life satisfaction
- Momentary utility
- Gender Time allocation
- Gender
Internal reference
- PSE Working Papers n°2022-35
Pages
- 38 p.
URL of the HAL notice
Version
- 1