Work schedule arrangements in two-adult households with children

The concept “work schedule arrangement” refers to the decision how many hours per week to work and how to allocate these hours across the days of the week. In two-adult households with children, the work schedule arrangement of parents is more complicated owing to the presence of children, which induces a series of activities that parents need to organize and coordinate. Besides considering personal preferences, parents also need to trade-off between working longer to generate more income and have better promotion opportunities, and working less hours to have enough time to organize and conduct other activities, especially children-related activities. In modeling work schedule arrangements of two-adult households with children, we first develop a random utility model to represent the work schedule decision-making process. It assumes that the utility of work arrangements is not only a function of work duration and other job characteristics, but also of the (joint) time to spend with or take care of the children. We therefore include the state of the children, which indicates the location where they are at any given moment in time (home, school/day care). Under the assumption that households maximize the utility derived from their work schedule, weekly work schedules for each spouse are generated, subject to observed daily and weekly total household and/or individual working hours. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the model, we compare the difference between the generated and observed work schedules of the households. The results show that the model accurately predicts observed work schedules in terms of start time, number of working hours and days of the week.