How work affects our free time and what it means for retirement
Kathleen Mullen, associate professor of economics, is leading a study on how the job demands of workers affect their leisure time and retirement decisions.
Job Demands, Time Use, and the Timing of Retirement
The effect of a job isn’t limited to being on the clock, and a College of Arts and Sciences researcher is finding out how a job affects workers’ free time—and how that could influence the decision to retire.
Through a grant from the Michigan Retirement and Disability Research Center at the University of Michigan, CAS Associate Professor and Petrone Chair in Economics Kathleen Mullen is working with a team of researchers who are investigating job demands of workers with the goal of how it affects leisure time and retirement decisions.
Previous research on the strains of the workplace has focused on what happens on the job, but there’s a gap in understanding how leisure time can impact work longevity and vice versa.
Physically demanding jobs can affect how workers unwind at home.
“If you have this very physically demanding job where you’re stacking boxes in a warehouse all day, you’re probably going home and vegging out on the couch,” Mullen says. “Maybe you’re doing word puzzles because you're not actively using your brain during the day, and you want cognitive stimulation either for fun or to maintain your health.”
Workers’ preferences for physical activity could also influence the types of jobs they have.
“If you really like physical activity and enjoy it, maybe you seek out physically demanding jobs, and on your weekends, you're training for marathons,” Mullen says. “If we don't take into account that potential channel, we could be missing these reinforcing effects of what people are doing in their free time.”
Most existing research looks at survey data about work requirements. But those surveys neglect what happens off the clock, Mullen says.
Associate Professor of Economics Kathleen Mullen
If you're looking at survey data and you're figuring out people's work decisions and their health, you're missing, a lot of times, what they're doing in their free time.
Kathleen Mullen, professor of economics
Mullen is collaborating with two researchers to develop a pilot study to gauge how people spend their time at work: Italo Lopez Garcia, an economist at the RAND Corporation and an Institute of Labor Economics Research Fellow, and Arie Kapteyn, a professor at the University of Southern California.
The research team is working on surveys that ask workers about what they did during the workday, such as sending emails or attending meetings; how physically and cognitively demanding it was; and how they felt after completing the task.
Once the pilot survey is completed, it could be used in future studies to understand how leisure time impacts the ability and desire to keep working.
“In the future, how do work decisions intersect with people’s health,” Mullen says. “If you had this cognitively demanding job, and then you retire, does this translate to a real lack of cognitive demands in your free time? Or do you kind of make up for it in your new free time?"
