Abstract
A reduction in working hours is being considered to tackle issues associated with ecological sustainability, social equity and enhanced life satisfaction—a so-called triple dividend. With respect to an environmental dividend, we analyse the time-use rebound effects of reducing working time. We explore how an increase in leisure time triggers a rearrangement of time and expenditure budgets, and thus the use of resources in private households. Does it hold true that time-intensive activities replace resource-intensive consumption when people have more free time at their disposal? In order to give an answer to the question, we estimate the marginal propensity to consume and the marginal propensity to time use in Germany. The findings from national surveys on time use and expenditure show composition effects of gains in leisure time and income loss. The results show that time savings due to a reduction in working time trigger relevant rebound effects in terms of resource use. However, the authors put the rebound effects following a reduction in working time into perspective. Time-use rebound effects lead to increased voluntary social engagement and greater life satisfaction, the second and third dividends.
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Notes
- 1.
Free time is usually seen “as the time resources that are not bound up in obligatory activities, and over which one may therefore dispose more or less at will.” As such, free time is “the time that remains left over after subtracting work time and housework (child care, errands, housework), and personal care time (eating, sleeping, body care)” (Rosa 2013, p. 133). However, free time is a deliberately subjective notion of the time people consider to have freely available after they have been at to work or have taken care of their children. Time use for eating, sleeping, resting or even time at voluntary work or time with children is often stressed as free time as well. Eventually, we distinguish between time at formal, paid work (labour) and time outside labour for the estimation of potential rebound effects after working time reduction.
- 2.
Opportunity costs is a basic concept in micro economics. It basically refers to the fact that a choice between opportunities leaves the foregone alternative as a cost, as an option that has not been realised. The more options foregone, the higher the opportunity costs. When it comes to working time reductions, opportunity costs are often given as the forgone wages. In this regard, opportunity costs are high in high-wage countries.
- 3.
The data used in this publication were made available to us by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin. Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), data for years 1984–2012, version 29, SOEP, 2013, 10.5684/soep.v29 (see Wagner et al. 2007). We used the Panel Whiz-Addon for Stata v13.1 to compile and prepare the data (see Haisken-DeNew and Han 2010 for a documentation on Panel Whiz).
- 4.
Since no time units are given for differentiated leisure activities in the data (GSOEP), the coefficients help us to differentiate and deal with the heterogeneous leisure activities of respondents and thus resource implications of time use (see Buhl and Acosta (2015) for a full presentation of the estimation results and respective coefficients).
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Acknowledgements
Parts of this research are reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media: Sustainability Science, Work Less, Do Less? Working time reductions and rebound effects, online first, 2015, Johannes Buhl and José Acosta. The research has been fully revised according to helpful suggestions from the editors. The theoretical background on social acceleration and time-use rebound effects has been largely extended. The method and model to estimate time and income effects is given in full detail in the text. The empirical results have been extended by presenting historical trends of time use in Germany. The discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the underlying method and data has been elaborated to great extent as well.
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Buhl, J., Acosta, J. (2016). Labour Markets: Time and Income Effects from Reducing Working Hours in Germany. In: Santarius, T., Walnum, H., Aall, C. (eds) Rethinking Climate and Energy Policies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38807-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38807-6_10
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