This paper explores the effects of husbands? commuting time on wives? employment and family time allocation. We develop a unitary family model, and we show that when market services are imperfect substitutes of home produced goods, a longer husband's commuting time might decrease his wife's employment and increase his own working hours. We estimate these effects using employer-induced changes in home-to-work distances. We find that a 1% increase in the husband's commuting distance reduces his wife's employment probability by 0.016 percentage points and has a slight positive effect on his own working hours. The effects are stronger for couples with children and for highly educated husbands.

---

1 March 2018

---

Regional Science and Urban Economics 69, pp.25-37, 2018

---

DOI: 10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2017.12.004

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166046217302545?via%3Dihub

This Journal article is published under the centre's Education programme.