How do gender roles and family dynamics affect intra-household decisions

Riley Hall 106

I began to work as a research assistant with Dr. Wang to research household decisions in terms of time-use, such as doing chores, considering gender roles, aging populations and family dynamics. For instance, the productivity for a woman could be more than just doing the chores for an hour. Thus, there is an opportunity cost associated with this and it might be more beneficial to hire someone to do those chores. This project is a continuation of Dr. Wang’s previous research in which she found that high-income earners try to work more when they need more financial resources and time commitment to take care of their parents, while the impact is ambiguous for low-income earners. This current research will identify some household characteristics, to analyze the allocation of household resources by looking at the household expenditure and time-use patterns. Hence, we are working with two main data sets, the Time Use Survey and the Customer Expenditure Survey.