Time: Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 3:30-5:00 p.m.

Venue: Guoshun Campus, Starr Building, Room 303

Title: Richer and Busier? The Trend of Time Allocation in China

Speaker: Assistant Professor Lintong Li

Moderator: Assistant Professor Xiangyu Shi

Abstract:

We document the trend in time allocation in China from 2008 to 2024 using the latest available time-use survey data. In contrast to recent empirical evidence from Bick et al. (2018) and Boppart and Krusell (2020), we find that market hours per person increased by 3 to 6 hours per week in urban China, accompanied by a 60 percent increase in the wage rate over the same period. However, wage rates and market hours are strongly negatively correlated in the cross-section. At the same time, non-market hours per person declined sharply by a similar magnitude. To reconcile these facts, we build a quantitative life-cycle heterogeneous-agent incomplete-market model with home production and a pay-as-you-go pension transfer for accounting purposes. Quantitatively, we find that rising income uncertainty, changing demographic structures, and capital-augmenting productivity growth in home production help explain the increase in market hours. The calibrated model is able to replicate the observed empirical trend reasonably well. Our results suggest that it is crucial to account for non-market hours, demographic structures, and incomplete markets when analyzing the long-run trend in labor supply.

Bio: Lintong Li is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the National School of Development, Peking University. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2024. Prior to that, he obtained his bachelor's degrees in Physics and Economics from Peking University in 2017. His research interests lie in macroeconomics and labor economics, with a focus on the role of micro frictions in propagating aggregate shocks and the long-run trend in labor supply.