Almudena Sevilla

Does Culture Affect Divorce? Evidence From European Immigrants in the United States

This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home-country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.

Leisure Inequality in the United States: 1965-2003

This article exploits the complex sequential structure of the diary data in the American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) and constructs three classes of indicators that capture the quality of leisure (pure leisure, co-present leisure, and leisure fragmentation) to show that the relative growth in leisure time enjoyed by low-educated individuals documented in previous studies has been accompanied by a relative decrease in the quality of that leisure time. These results are not driven by any single leisure activity, such as time spent watching television. Our findings may offer a more comprehensive picture of inequality in the United States and provide a basis for weighing the relative decline in earnings and consumption for the less-educated against the simultaneous relative growth of leisure.

Time to Cook: Expenditure at Retirement in Spain

Detailed panel expenditure data from Spain reveal little evidence of a retirement consumption puzzle in 1985–2004. There is a drop in food at home expenditure in the later years of the sample along with evidence of households paying lower prices for the food they purchase after retirement. However, our findings are consistent with a model that allows for home production as long as one accounts for the greater participation in housework by men after retirement coinciding with this latter period. Our work adds to the evidence from several countries and helps in reconciling the retirement consumption puzzle with life‐cycle models.

Low-Skilled Immigration and Parenting Investments of College-Educated Mothers in the United States Evidence from Time-Use Data

This paper uses several decades of U.S. time-diary surveys to assess the impact of low-skilled immigration, through lower prices for commercial childcare, on parental time investments. Using an instrumental variables approach that accounts for the endogenous location of immigrants, we find that low-skilled immigration to the United States has contributed to substantial reductions in the time allocated to basic childcare by college-educated mothers of nonschool-aged children. However, these mothers have not reduced the time allocated to more stimulating educational and recreational activities with their children. Understanding the factors driving parental-time investments on children is crucial from a child-development perspective.

Total work time in Spain: evidence from time diary data

Using detailed time-use data from 2002–03 and 2009–10 for Spain, we analyse changes in the time-allocation decisions of the Spanish population, with a focus on the time devoted to total work. Consistent with prior literature, we document that the concept of ‘iso-work’ (e.g. the time devoted to total work by gender is equal) does not hold in societies with stringent gender roles, such as Spain. Women devote more time to total work than men, and this difference has increased throughout the period studied by 2 hours per week. The relative increase in total work for women compared to men can be explained by a relative increase in market work of 8 hours per week, coupled with a relative decrease in nonmarket work of 6 hours per week, which have led Spanish women to devote, relatively, 2 fewer hours to leisure per week in 2009–10, compared to 2002–03. We propose social norms as a potential explanation of these empirical findings. By uncovering how individuals allocate their time inside and outside the market over a period of time, our results may improve our understanding of the dynamics of economic change and welfare.

Gender, Time-Use, and Fertility Recovery in Industrialized Countries

This paper explores gendered patterns of time use as an explanatory factor behind fertility trends in the developed world. We review the theoretical foundations for this link, and assess the existing evidence suggesting that a more equal division of labor within the home leads to more children, both at the household (micro) and country (macro) levels. After decades of unprecedented fertility decline in the industrialized world, only a handful of countries in the West exhibit replacement fertility rates – around two children per woman. Paradoxically, birth rates are substantially lower in countries in which family units (and women within families) remain primarily responsible for familial care obligations, and where the role of the State in the provision of care services is marginal. Very low fertility poses challenges for economic growth and threatens the sustainability of pay-as-you-go welfare systems. It is thus important to understand why some developed countries managed to sustain near-replacement fertility rates or to recover from very low fertility, while others fell and still remain at lowest-low rates of about 1.3 children per woman. Looking at time-use and fertility trends for a few representative industrialized countries, we hint at the existence of a threshold ratio of gender equity in the distribution of domestic work that low fertility countries need to cross before being able to enter a phase of fertility recovery.

Do House Prices Affect Consumption? A Re‐Assessment of the Wealth Hypothesis

This paper undertakes a comparison exercise to disentangle what drives the opposite findings regarding the effect of house prices on consumption documented in two papers using the same data set for the UK. On the one hand, Campbell and Cocco (2007) find that old owners are the most benefited by a house price increase and young renters the least, confirming the so-called wealth hypothesis. On the other hand, Attanasio, Blow, Hamilton, and Leicester (2009) find that house prices have the same impact on consumption across age groups, consistent with the so-called common factor hypothesis. First, we confirm that the findings in both papers can be reproduced. Second, we rule out a number of potential reasons related to the basic data construction, and provide evidence that the functional form (i.e., an Euler equation of consumption vs. a reduced form life-cycle model) and not data aggregation considerations (household level data vs. synthetic cohort data) may be at the root of the conflicting results in the two papers. Our findings revive the debate of whether there is an effect of house prices on consumption.

Flexible working in the UK and its impact on couples’ time coordination

The ability to combine work with quality time together as a family is at the heart of the concept of work-life balance. Using previously unexploited data on couples’ work schedules we investigate the effect of flexible working on couples’ coordination of their daily work schedules in the UK. We consider three distinct dimensions of flexible working: flexibility of daily start and finish times (flexitime), flexibility of work times over the year (annualized hours), and generalized control of working hours. We show that having flexitime at work increases a couple’s amount of coordination of their daily work schedules by a half to 1 h, which is double the margin of adjustment enjoyed by couples with no flexitime. The impact is driven by couples with children. In contrast to flexitime, the other two forms of flexible working do not seem to increase synchronous time. Our results suggest that having flexitime plays an important role in relaxing the work scheduling constraints faced by families with young children, and that effective flexible working time arrangements are those that increase the worker’s and not the employer’s flexibility.