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In this paper, we use time-use surveys to examine trends in the allocation of time in five industrialized countries over the last thirty years. Adjusting for changing demographics, we find that leisure time across countries has converged over this period. Specifically, leisure time has declined five to eight hours in countries with high leisure levels thirty years ago and has increased around one hour in the other countries. For men the reduction in leisure was driven by an increase in nonmarket work, while women dramatically increased time allocated to market work and decreased nonmarket work time. Lastly, we show that like in the USA leisure inequality increased in all countries of our sample.

Summary Using the example of Switzerland, this paper examines the extent to which the state and the social security institutions change the income distribution. Two sets of questions are examined: (1) Who benefits from the public services, and who bears the public costs? (2) To what extent does an annual redistribution involve redistribution (a) across households with different lifetime income, and (b) across different phases of life within the same households? Budget incidence analyses and pseudo panel procedures allow to compare annual and lifetime household incomes that arise before and after transfers. The results suggest that public interventions induce substantial redistribution, which is due primarily however, to income-smoothing transfers within households and not to redistribution across households.

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