Opting Out and Buying Out: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time

It has been proposed that the negative association between wives' earnings and their time in housework is due to greater outsourcing of household labor by households with high-earning wives, but this hypothesis has not been tested directly. In a sample of dual-earner married couples in the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and Retirement Study (N = 796), use of market substitutes for women's housework was found to be only weakly associated with wives' time cooking and cleaning. Furthermore, expenditures on market substitutes explain less than 15% of the earnings-housework time relationship. This suggests that use of market substitutes plays a smaller role in explaining variation in wives' time in household labor than has previously been hypothesized.