Loafing or Learning? The Demand for Informal Education
36 Pages Posted: 16 Sep 2003
Date Written: August 2003
Abstract
Using detailed time use data for Germany a positive correlation is found between the level of schooling education and time investments in informal education. Two hypotheses explain this observation: (1) highly educated people have higher opportunity costs of their leisure time and thus prefer leisure activities which add to their market productivity (wage effect) and (2) highly educated people have a preference for "high quality" leisure (taste effect). The demand for informal education is derived in a household production model accounting for both explanations. An empirical investigation finds evidence for both effects with the taste effect being the more important effect. Highly educated people accumulate human capital through their specific leisure time use. This increases the skill-gap between higher and lower educated people.
Keywords: informal education, lifelong learning, time allocation, household production, censored LAD
JEL Classification: C24, D13, J22, J24
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Sleep and the Allocation of Time
By Jeff Biddle and Daniel S. Hamermesh
-
The Demand for Variety: A Household Production Perspective
By Reuben Gronau and Daniel S. Hamermesh
-
The Demand for Variety: A Household Production Perspective
By Daniel S. Hamermesh and Reuben Gronau
-
Stressed Out on Four Continents: Time Crunch or Yuppie Kvetch?
By Daniel S. Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee
-
Stressed Out on Four Continents: Time Crunch or Yuppie Kvetch?
By Daniel S. Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee
-
Time vs. Goods: The Value of Measuring Household Production Technologies
By Reuben Gronau and Daniel S. Hamermesh
-
Food Expenditure, Food Preparation Time and Household Economies of Scale
-
A Large-Scale Validation Study of Measurement Errors in Longitudinal Survey Data
-
Does it Matter Who Responded to the Survey? Trends in the U.S. Gender Earnings Gap Revisited
By Jungmin Lee and Sokbae Lee
-
When Pavarotti Meets Harry Potter at the Super Bowl
By Shlomi Parizat and Ron Shachar