Flexible Working and Couples' Coordination of Time Schedules

This project will explore the potential for flexible working to increase couples' ability to coordinate their work schedules. We will also look at whether there are distinct impacts among households with and without children, and with different working arrangements (dual full-time and part-time/full-time). The findings will improve our understanding of how constraints in the labour market affect households' ability to optimise their time use, and have implications for policies designed to increase the work-life balance of families.
The proposed project will extend the economics literature in three important ways. First, it will expand the emerging literature on flexible work by examining the importance of labour market constraints on couples' time together as a dimension of household well-being, as opposed to just individual well-being as in previous studies. Second, it will incorporate the timing of market work, as opposed to the total time devoted to market work. Only few empirical studies have looked at the timing of work (Connelly and Kimmel, 2007; Rapoport and Le Bourdais, 2008; Presser, 1994; Paley, 2006), and only one study has modelled the individual choice to work or not at different times of the day (Hamermesh, 1999). Third, we will go beyond the literature by not just describing the patterns of household synchronisation (Hamermesh, 2002; Jenkins and Osberg, 2005; Sullivan, 1996), but also by assessing how flexible work arrangements might influence these patterns and how flexible work interacts with household structure.
This project will use innovative and previously unexploited data on time scheduling from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to investigate the effect of the provision of flexible working by the employer on the ability of couples' to coordinate time together. The BHPS contains rich information about individuals and the households they belong to, including details of individuals' labour market experiences and use of flexible work. In its 13th wave in 2003, the BHPS introduced a novel set of questions about work timing which, to our knowledge, have never been exploited before.
We will use regression methods to estimate the effect of flexible work on the potential time that couples can spend together by coordinating their work schedules (synchronous time). We will also address the possible endogeneity of flexible work: if couples actively seek out flexible jobs in order to spend more time together then finding a positive association between flexible work arrangements and synchronous time may simply mean that couples who prefer to spend more time together are also the ones seeking more flexible working conditions, as opposed to more flexible working conditions "causing" couples to spend more time together. Thus, inferring any causal mechanism from simple correlations between flexible working arrangements and the time couples spend together would lead to false conclusions about the effectiveness of any policy measure aimed at increasing the flexibility in the work place. We will use Instrumental Variables (IV) methods to estimate causal effects, constructing instruments from the detailed employment histories in the BHPS.
The policy relevance of this research is clear. Although the proportion of workplaces offering flexible (or 'family-friendly') work arrangements has increased in recent years (Whitehouse et al, 2007), households still face enormous constraints which prevent them from coordinating as much as they wish. Around 40% of workers are not working their desired number of hours (Bryan, 2007). Given the Government's interest in promoting flexible jobs, this study will add to the body or work on work-life balance by being the first study, to our knowledge, to assess the impact of flexible working on couples' coordination of their work time. By identifying the groups who stand to benefit most from workplace flexibility, it will assist in targeting the promotion of work-life balance policies

This work is intended to benefit a range of academic and non-academic users. Because this will be the first project of its kind in the UK and, to our knowledge, elsewhere, users include not only those from the UK, but also from Europe, North America, and other developed countries. Non-academic users include civil servants and policy advisors, notably the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Work, and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), which are the two Departments with a prime interest in flexible work; health professionals interested in the effect of working conditions on stress levels and health, and other women's interest groups interested in the reconciliation of work and family life (such as the Women's Budget Group and the Fawcett Society), as well as the Family and Parenting Institute .

Policy makers will benefit from this work because the findings will improve our understanding of how access to flexible work affects time use within the household. This will have implications for policies designed to increase the work-life balance of families and promote equal opportunities for women. Because we will look at the impact of flexible work arrangements for different groups of workers and households, our results will inform policy makers about which groups should be targeted, and whether improvements in scope and targeting could be made.

The results will be relevant to third sector organisations working on human resource development and employment issues, such as the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and the Work Foundation. Employees and families, and organisations that represent them, will benefit from the research by being able to use it to inform their campaigns for better understanding of their perspectives and provision of flexible working that they need to help them attain a sense of mastery over their schedules and to live their lives in ways that they, rather than their workplace, determines.

The findings of the project will be publicised to the general public and other interest groups through a dedicated section of the ISER and CTUR websites, which will be updated as the project develops. Key findings will be communicated in press releases to ISER's and CTUR's well-established network of media contacts, and non-technical summaries will be published in the ISER Newsletter, which has a circulation of several thousand.
We will seek opportunities to offer briefings and to present our findings in a policy context and to demonstrate their policy relevance to Government Departments, MPs with an interest in this field, and other interest groups. To that end we will exploit our close contacts with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), which are the two Departments with prime responsibility for flexible work, as well as contacts with third sector organisations, such as the Women's Budget Group, of which Dr. Sevilla Sanz is a member.