Spouses' Shared Time in a Cross-National Context: A Comparison of the U.S., Spain and France

This paper investigates spouses shared time across countries to understand how social conditions and policy are related to married couples time allocation. To do this, we use time use surveys from four countries with varying social conditions and welfare regimes. We use information about who is present during activities to analyze total time with spouse, time with spouse only and time with spouse and children. We use two surveys from each country to estimate changes over time and compare shared time during periods of economic expansion (around 2000) and periods of recession (around 2010). To our knowledge, this is the first study analyzing couples time spent together in a cross national context. Our preliminary results comparing USA and Spain show American couples spending less time with a spouse than Spanish couples.