W. Keith Bryant

Participation in Philanthropic Activities: Donating Money and Time

The 1994 Independent Sector Survey of Giving and Volunteering conducted by the Gallup Organization was used to study the propensities with which people are solicited for money or time as well as the probabilities that people will volunteer time or donate money or property, given they have been solicited or not solicited, utilizing a two-stage probit analysis. Forty-five percent of respondents were asked by philanthropic organizations to volunteer time in 1994. Of those, 80% did volunteer. Some 78% of respondents were asked to donate money or property in 1994. Of those, 85% donated some money or property. Human, social, and cultural capital explained those who were solicited to volunteer. The same variables plus income variables determined whom to be solicited for donating money or property. Human, social, and cultural capital and income variables accounted for more variation in the probabilities to volunteer or donate, given respondents were not asked to contribute, than the probabilities to volunteer or donate, given respondents were asked to contribute.

Electronic Course Evaluations: Does an Online Delivery System Influence Student Evaluations?

Abstract: An increasing number of academic institutions are considering changing to Web-based systems to take advantage of efficiencies in the collection of end-of-semester course evaluaitons. In considering such a change it is important that researchers determine whether it will affect mean evaluaiton scores and response rates. We undertook this study in a department considering changing over to electronic course evaluations ot determine the effect such a change would have on the quality of resulting course evaluation data. Study results found that Web-based evaluation methods led to lower response rates, but that lower response rates did not appear to affect mean evaluation scores. They suggested that faculty evaluation scores will not be adversely affected by switching from paper to Web-based evaluations.

Are we investing less in the next generation? Historical trends in time spent caring for children

Historical and current data sets are used to trace the time married women and men spend caring for their own children on a daily basis. The data are also used to estimate the total time parents spend in raising two children to the age of 18. The analysis is restricted to primary child care time; i.e., the actual, direct administration of personal care, including physical care (feeding, bathing, dressing, putting to bed) and such other direct personal care as teaching, chauffering, supervising, counseling, managing, training, amusing, and entertaining. Secondary parental child care time is not studied. Although white married women spent about. 56 hours per day per child in primary child care in the 1924–1931 period, by 1981, the time had decreased to about 1.00 hour per day per child. Married men spent 0.25 hours per day per child in 1975, the first year for which national data exists. By 1981, this figure had increased to 0.33 hours per day per child. Raising two children to age 18 required about 5,789 hours of a white, employed, married womans time and 14,053 hours of a white, unemployed, married womans time in 1981. Husbands of white, employed married women spent about 1,500 more hours in raising two children to age 18 than the husbands of white, unemployed married women.

Alternative Strategies For Pricing Home Work Time

For many years a variety of techniques for measuring the value of home work time have been proposed and criticized. In this paper, these criticisms are dis cussed at length as a prelude to the introduction of a potentially more appealing measure first suggested by James Heckman (1974). Calculation of this measure, frequently referred to as the reservation wage, is presented in detail. Estimates obtained using the reservation wage technique are contrasted with market alter native estimates derived with the same data set. The empirical findings suggest that the market alternative cost method understates the true value of a womans home time to the household.

A Comparison of the Household Work of Married Females: The Mid-1920s and the Late 1960s.

The current view ofthe time spent in household work by marriedfemales is that it has not changed during the 20th century. One much quoted study shows the workday of thefull-time housewife increasingfrom the mid-1920s to the late 1960s. This article uses the data thatform the basis of such judgments to reestimate the time married women in the mid-1 920s and the late 1960s spent in household work. Revised estimates show that the household workday of married women fell from 7.35 hours per day to 6.31 hours in 1967–1968, a decline of 14%. The household workday offull-time housewives fell by 7.5% to about 6.84 hours per day, whereas that of employed married womenfell to 5.13 hours per day. Of the components of household workfood preparation and cleanup declined the most, whereas the time devoted to marketing and management rose.

Human capital, time use, and other family behavior

Human capital theory is recommended as a fertile theory to explain many aspects of family time use behavior. Some examples are given of the potential usefulness of the concepts of general and specific human capital. Investment of parental time in children is urged as a fruitful area of time use research.

Behavior and Productivity Implications of Institutional and Project Funding of Research

A behavioral model of a research scientist is utilized to develop the characteristics of the demand for institutional (lR) and project research (PR) funds. The demand analysis implies a trade-off between the allocative and productive efficiency of IR funding and the research output mix of PR funding. The model is used to evaluate the formula and competitive grant funding of U.S. agricultural research. We conclude that national research policy should be cast in terms of the relative mix of the two systems of support, not in the absolute merits of either system.

The Demand for Service Contracts

The Magnuson-Moss Warranty-Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975 for the first time explicitly provided the federal government with the legislative authority to regulate warranties on goods and services. The Act provided for the regulation of the form and some of the terms and language used in warranties (Gerner and Bryant 1976; Heaton and Katz 1978; Heaton, Katz, and Adam 1978). The attention paid to warranties, however, has also created interest in substitutes for written warranties, among which is the service contract. While the service contract has been used not as a substitute for a written warranty but rather as an option available on the expiration of the warranty, there is little question that under appropriate conditions manufacturers would offer service contracts in place of warranties. An appliance service contract typically provides repair service, specified maintenance service, preventive checkups, and may provide specified consequential damages. Service contracts have been available for many years on some products. However, their widespread

The economics of housespousery: An essay on household work

The economic model of the household has been used extensively to examine questions relating to work within the household. This essay takes a critical look at this model and these household work applications. It concludes that the model provides several useful insights regarding factors that have influenced the decline in womens household work time during this century and the changes in the overall economic value of household work. In other areas (e.g., parental child care), the model has rarely been used although it has the potential to provide useful insights. Finally, in certain applications, such as investigations of the gender-related specialization of function within the household, the model relies on unrealistic assumptions that need to be modified if it is to prove useful.

Work patterns and marital status change

The impact of marital status changes on the lives of adults and children has increased importance as marriage, divorce, and remarriage have become more frequent patterns of family composition change. These events can often be predicted by the family members involved so that they may be accompanied by changes in labor market activity prior to the events themselves. The study reported here uses panel data to examine the labor market activity changes that precede marital status changes. Women who become divorced increase hours of work in the year or two before the divorce occurs, and women who become remarried decrease hours of work in the year of the remarriage and thereafter. For men there seems to be little change in labor supply during these years. However, hours of housework for men do seem to change.