Time Use, Emotional Well-Being, and Unemployment: Evidence from Longitudinal Data

How do unemployed individuals allocate and experience their time? How does their time use and emotional experience change once they find a job? This article provides new evidence on the time use and emotional well-being of unemployed and employed individuals in the United States, using longitudinal data from a survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey. We find evidence that the time spent on home production activities drops sharply at the time of reemployment, with the magnitude of the shift in line with previous research using cross-sectional time use surveys (Burda and Hamermesh 2010; Krueger and Mueller forthcoming). 1 Leisure activities also decrease at the time of reemployment, though somewhat less than in cross-sectional time use data, partly because those finding a job were spending more time on job search activities in the weeks prior to reemployment. We also investigate the relationship between unemployment and emotional well-being in connection with time use. Despite the fact that the unemployed spend relatively more time in leisure-related activities, we find that the unemployed enjoy these activities to a lesser degree