Taxes and Time Use: Fiscal Policy in a Household Production Model

Time use data on work and leisure is presented for a broad group of OECD countries. The home production model explicitly accounts for taxes and public expenditures on day care and elder care, substitutes for work households perform at home. Taxes are important for matching time use patterns in Canada, the UK, and continental Europe, but cannot explain the high levels of market work and low levels of home work observed in Scandinavia. Subsidies of services like day care that substitute for home work are shown to be quantitatively important for bringing both market and home work predictions in line with the data.