[00:00:05]
>> My great pleasure to introduce Dr actually Ashley Whillans. So she's so incredibly accomplished that I could take up the bulk of the colloquial speaking to her professional accomplishments so I've just selected a few highlights she said Burke local health fellow an assistant professor in business administration at the Harvard Business School and she's us a social psychologist by training receiving her Ph d. from the University of British Columbia and in 27 team where she also received the cads award for the best education in Canada across.

[00:00:43]
Parts of social science and humanities Since then she's published in several top scholarly journals and has been very very successful science advocate translating a research for public facing outlets such as h.b.r. of New York Times and The Wall Street Journal's she just recently like literally early just. Published her 1st trade book entitled Time smart on a personal note after as assistant professor I felt personally attacked and illuminated while reading it and it's a great read and if you haven't had a chance pick it up and read it in her research generally focuses on very interplay between time and money how we make these decisions and how it affects our well being so please help me however we do it online in introducing our talk to Ashley on.

[00:01:40]
Thanks so much credit something for having me today the whole reason I wrote the book is actually because I'm not so great at making time money trade off of my own life despite studying it but is hoping to help myself and help others put some of the practices we know from positive psychology to practice in everyday life to live happier and more meaningful less stressed lives so I'm going to be talking primarily about a project that I recently completed a handful of weeks ago looking at a large scale field experiment in Kenya looking at the benefit of reducing time poverty among people who are financially and temporarily constrains the working mothers living in a large informal settlement in Kenya and also share some ongoing research looking at is similar at a similar question in Raja's son in the rule environment as opposed to an urban environment that fits with a broader program of research I have looking at the relationship between time use money as discretionary spending and happiness so my dissertation really focused on how the tradeoff that we make between time and money to char willingness to give up money to have more time live by living closer to the office or spending money on housecleaning services opposed to ritual purchased for self can improve subjective well beings and this research in this project is really meant to try to take some of these ideas and put them into a more policy oriented context and see what we can learn when we try to take some of what I learned during my dissertation and put it into practice in real world context.

[00:03:07]
So with that I'll be sharing this working paper that we're resubmitting soon called the lives alleviating time poverty among the working poor it was accepted as a pre-registered report at nature human behavior meaning that it was accepted before the results are known that went through peer review 4 rounds in fact prior to accepting the pre-registered report and now the study is done and where the results will be sharing with you are the results that we're writing up for resubmission to the journal and if anyone has any questions about that process I engage in it a couple of times think it's quite important from an open science perspective for the field I'd be happy to engage in a broader conversation about that later so there's interest in focusing on time used as a path to greater happiness comes from a great deal of research that I became inspired by in my graduate studies showing that there's a complicated relationship between discretionary income and subjective wellbeing when I talk about subjective while being much like how Chris and others might talk about it I'm thinking about in certain contexts I'm thinking about 2 main components the overall cognitive evaluation of life or your life satisfaction as well as the amount of joy or stress experienced on a daily basis looking at both the cognitive and effective components of well being and that's a definition I'm going to use throughout this talk consistent with Ed Diener and others in the field there's other ways of looking at subjective wellbeing but that's the particular definition I work with in mind works.

[00:04:29]
So there's been more recent research suggesting that and replicating condiment and Dean's famous findings so I need to ministering marginal utility of wealth and subjective wellbeing and number tickler like that as facts and we also see a diminishing marginal utility of income on the amount of joy that people experience on an everyday basis the inflection point happens depending on your country context but really what's important to recognize is that having more wealth does not necessarily translate into greater happiness can protect against sadness that my lad me that Georgetown cost in a cushion love has research suggesting that having more money can protect against sadness but doesn't necessarily translate into greater positive emotional experience on an everyday basis leaving open the question that what we do with our time and our money might also play an important role not necessarily the amount of money we have or the amount of time we have but how we use those resources they play an important role in subjective well being one reason that wealth is not necessarily translate into greater happiness is that people who make more money tend to feel more pressed for time so in my research I also focus on a concept called time poverty which is its idea feeling that you have too many things to do and not enough time in the day to do them so this is the subjective feeling of not having enough when it comes to time and as you make more money people typically feel like they are more pressed for time as the subjective value of their time increases as their income increases and people who make more money typically spend more time in what is thought of as unpleasant activities such as working and shopping as opposed to more positive activities such as socializing volunteering and exercising now this is also a new one finding that I'd be happy to go into later we recently published a paper suggesting for the very top income this might not necessarily be true but I'd be happy to engage in that discussion later it's a little tangential to the conversation today so in my research I became interested in this idea if wealth has a smaller than expected or more tenuous relationship with subjective well being so one might expect maybe the extent to which people are willing to give up money to have more free time or make tradeoffs between these valuable resources might produce increases of well being and in particular potentially giving up money to have more time might produce well being by reducing the time stress that sometimes coincides with having more income.

[00:06:44]
And so I've been focused primarily on tradeoffs as I mentioned at the outset of the talk between time money and how the tradeoff influence subjective well being such as making consumer decisions take a direct flight versus an indirect flight or live closer to the office versus further away from the office and spend time stuck in traffic each and every day.

[00:07:02]
What I was finding in my data over the course of my dissertation is that individuals who made time saving services purchased this so they were willing to give up money to have more free time such as by paying for meals delivery reported greater happiness and less stress I've also show this pattern cosmically However what I also observed and during my job market process people are always asking me all of the strategy of kind of giving up money to have more free time only for people who have a lot of money at their disposal and what I was finding were some really interesting pattern of results which led me to take on this current project whereby people who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic status make less money in my studies reported actually quite high levels of time poverty so they reported feeling overwhelmed by the demands of work and life and they also seem to benefit more from giving up money in order to have more free time at least some of the time so here we're talking about small amounts of discretionary income when people at the lower end of the income distribution gave up money to have more time such as by engaging in time saving services like ordering takeout they reported greater happiness benefits as a result and so it's finding these patterns whereby individuals who are struggling to make ends meet actually seem to benefit more from these time related choices in part because they felt more pressed for time or as pressed for time as people at the very high end end of the income distribution and one reason when I started to investigate the data Chris it started to make sense to me people who are struggling to make ends meet or who are financially constrained might have to commute further to their place of employment that might work multiple jobs fragments their time and they might have less access to the market economy in general such as social support.

[00:08:43]
Or b. of a market economy they can't outsource is as regularly or might not have access to childcare thereby Spragg mentoring their time even more and people who make less money are also more likely to be single parents who have this in mind I really wanted to understand whether and what the benefits might be of reducing time constraints among those who are also financially constrained hence why we went to Kenya and all explain a little bit more about the research that we conducted in a moment.

[00:09:10]
So this also ties to a large deal of research on scarcity in general this general premise that removing the burdens of unpaid labor or time poverty among the working poor might be a path to greater wellbeing comes from the larger body of literature looking at the behavioral facts of poverty so there's an array of seemingly counterproductive behaviors that are associated with feeling like you don't have enough of either money or time and actually not having enough or living below one's potential so individuals who are living below the poverty line tend to have lower engagement and preventative health care even when they could potentially access it they have lower medication adherence reduced productivity at work and lower adoption of these full new technologies.

[00:09:52]
And one of the reasons are mechanisms by which behavioral economists and consumer and researchers and psychologists suggest explain this relationship between poverty and some of these sort of sub optimal long term decisions or even short term decisions that are observed in the literature that poverty is going to lower wellbeing and greater stress in turn these feelings of not having enough both objective really not having enough resources to meet one's basic needs but also the subjective feeling of not having enough which I talked about at the outset of the talk in terms of time poverty and impede cognitive function and results in some of the sub optimal decisions that I just mentioned.

[00:10:28]
Now again when Usually we think about people who are financial or resource constrained we're thinking about people who have. Financial constraints however poverty also involves a shortage of time when I went about trying to look at whether there were publicly available data sets I might be able to use to explore time poverty among the working poor and I didn't find a lot of time use evidence out there but the data that was there suggested that when people.

[00:10:59]
Are feeling the fine or are financially constrained rather they also tend to be time poor but they gauge in long hours of unpaid work and have no choice but to do so this is particularly pernicious these this time party is particularly pernicious in developing country context and times Ariza tax that considerably affect low income women and working mothers living in developing countries those coming across to to 6 like women in sub-Saharan Africa or Iran this field experiment when an average of 4.2 hours on unpaid work each and every day and I'll talk about this in my experiment but the women that I was studying had to spend a lot more time on household production task because they didn't have the conveniences that many of us take for granted for example they would have to wash their laundry by hand and then watch it dry to make sure it didn't get stolen the basic household production task takes much longer and financially constrained environments.

[00:11:55]
Yet there is an assumption that can arise in the development economics literature and elsewhere that people who are cash poor are time Brett just goes with some social psychological research suggesting that we often think that people who don't have as much money are living below the poverty line are unfortunately the general perception is we think that they're not hard workers and so as a result we think that people who are living below the poverty line tend to have a lot of time available and as a result many aid programs to do this by.

[00:12:27]
Yes that we tend to have neglected time cost placed on recipients so I work in a department with a lot of economists So this literature was new to me but what I found really interesting is when aid programs think about providing or supporting individuals in order to help.

[00:12:46]
Meet their basic needs many programs actually build infraction and build in or do all cost in order to target low income households so they might put the aid further away or involved long waits to see under the idea that the people who will need it the most will wait the longest or travel to for this and this is meant to make sure that the aid is going to people who need it the most and this is the logic behind it because it's very hard to process the income among individuals who are low s.p.f. especially in developing markets like Kenya and India however this isn't always affective at helping people who need it most get the aid that they need that can actually reduce the uptake of aid and as we're arguing in this paper are people who are financially constrained also tend to be time for so this idea that people who are struggling to make ends meet have a lot of time available might not be the right assumption to be making especially in the initial data that I saw in my job market peeper.

[00:13:45]
So why did time neglect occur from policymakers or people and in much of my data we often focus on material constraints and money at the expense of focusing on time. There's this belief that I just mentioned that the materially poor have a lot of idle time available and we have a psychological bias that I've observed in a lot of my data that we undervalue time especially when material resources are scarce so in my data I see that people are especially likely to make money versus time related tradeoffs they're sacrificing time to have more money when they're feeling financially uncertain or they're under perceived or actual resource constraints.

[00:14:23]
And there's also a lack of time you see them when the working poor as I briefly mentioned when I started this project I thought I'd be able to find the American Time Use Survey for individuals living in India in Kenya and sort of replicate some of the findings I was finding my North American and European samples covered the granular time you status wasn't something that was easily stuff of all and there wasn't a lot of information on it so part of the impetus for running this project was also collect really granular time you save on how women in the financially constrained environment are also spending their time and and what kinds of time use our associate with greater subjective lobbying for the river quick question whatever not to use or deal cost for conscious or not so in the context of the experiments that I'm presenting they're conscious and deliberate So the idea is that policymakers or economists development economists are running these trials are making it difficult for people to get paid out of this idea that people who will need it the most will go through the most hurdles to get it so it's this idea of building and purposeful friction to make people wait or travel long distances as a sorting or filtering mechanism and there's mixed evidence in the development economics literature that that's actually an effective mechanism for thank you.

[00:15:46]
Chris think it's strange to give talks alone in your room without verbal feedback so thank you for clarifying questions. Just to test this assumption in the field that even policymakers sort of underestimate the potential benefits of time saving services for the women in our particular context so we made this particular context all talk about that in a moment we asked.

[00:16:13]
Paula policymakers in training at the Harvard Kennedy School to magine that they were consulting for a nonprofit in that increasing the subjective wellbeing of working mothers and prepare the large informal settlement where we conduct the experiment and we asked this question in a couple of different ways and you regardless of how we asked the question we got a similar result so we asked the policymakers how would you allocate $2100.00 shillings or 21 dollars us per cent b.n. and they could either provide an open ended choice or they could which we then later classified or they could choose among 3 programs and what we found is only 2 policy makers spontaneously suggested using aid to save these women time and we provided all range of context about who these women were and what constraints they were facing so it was an information problem we we provided them with information about the context of the women that we were studying and 87 percent chose cash and there is an economic rationale for choosing cash and I'll talk about that in a moment but unconditional cash transfers are seen as the gold standard of economic development because presumably people should be able to spend it in any way they want but I know from my data and we're kind of making this.

[00:17:23]
We're looking at this and testing this in this experiment that people are often not going to choose timesaving especially in resource constrained environment so we wanted to test unconditional cash transfers against time saving vouchers in this particular context which is quite a conservative task given that you think you can have wellbeing benefits but we're trying to make the argument that time saving services might also have benefits too especially when women are temporarily constrained as well financially constraining So we think that reducing time poverty particularly among individuals who are struggling to make ends meet might have overlooked benefits for subjective well being perceived stress and relationship conflicts so those are the key dependent variables that I'll be discussing in the.

[00:18:06]
The Talk today. And there's a little bit of evidence suggesting that this might be the case though in the Indian development survey of 40000 over 40000 households nationally representative Well there's some tentative evidence that women who own cooks those which saves them time each day so they don't have to cut down.

[00:18:27]
Or firewood and then bring it back to the home but they have electric cooks those. Are healthier and have higher incomes however this is correlational So we're versed causality cannot be ruled out could just be possible that higher income and higher status individuals in a particular context are better able or have better health and are also that are able to afford these cuts to.

[00:18:49]
So as I already mentioned I have research showing that time saving as opposed to material incentives can promote well being so in. 7 correlational studies that replicated it many times since and within subject experiments just spending 40 Canadian dollars in one week in a way that would save you time was going to cause all end of a subjective wellbeing so the expense which you experience positive emotions and less negative emotions the reduction Sometimes stress as compared to spending that same amount of money on a material purchase for yourself the people felt happier after making a time saving purchase in part because they were able to spend that time engaged in social activities which we know are good for happiness and they spent less time working and they felt less stress so there was both direct and indirect effects explaining why time saving services were more likely to promote greater subjective well being and greater happiness we've also replicated this recently with relationship satisfaction which is why we focus on that as a dependent variable in this study however this is initial preliminary evidence from North American context so again it doesn't allow us to provide a policy relevant test of the question of whether aid that is deliberately set to save women's time might have positive benefits for subjective well being and fast but either greater in magnitude or similar in magnitude to unconditional cash transfers so we went to.

[00:20:11]
Nairobi Kenya and so this is the photo of compare which is the informal settlement where I conducted fieldwork but about 2000000 inhabitants but the population estimates vary given that census data is hard to collect in this very volatile environment where people are moving in and out of this informal settlement quite frequently they have access to basic amenities running water and schools although they technically live off the grid in the sense that these basic services are not provided by the city but rather provided the leaders within their own community.

[00:20:43]
And importantly and most importantly for the research test question that I thought to test working mothers in comparison a significant material and temporal constraints so they're both financially and temporarily constrained they spend 42 hours on paid work per week on average and 36 hours of unpaid work per week on average but sometimes get the question of you know why did I go to the specific context it was we wanted to give away substantial amounts of time and substantial amounts of money which would have been very difficult to do in the us context the 1st year faculty member and so we wanted to go to a context where we could actually buy people out of a lot of unpaid labor and provide a lot of cash to have the potential largest impact some subjective wellbeing that we thought would be possible in this context.

[00:21:32]
And I'd be happy to kind of chalk talk this through but we also had a connection at the Blue Star Center for Behavioral Economics where who was our implementation partner my co-author on this project worked there before graduate school so we were also familiar with the context of our our formal partnership with a nonprofit organization there.

[00:21:53]
They also the women in the sample earned about $1.00 to $2.00 us per day so we can see their temporarily and financially constraints now in terms of what time saving services might look like in an informal settlement context you might find interesting in all of our pilot data we did about a year of pilot data before we started to run to design our initial experiments and then to scale our experiment so that we could run $6.00 to $800.00 women per every 3 months so it took us quite a long time to design and implement a study just to make sure we weren't importing ideas from North American and European context but in a and then new environment that didn't necessarily make sense for the women we're studying we found there were very few affordable services available there were laundromats.

[00:22:37]
There were restaurants but they weren't that affordable so there was low supply and low willingness to pay 77 percent in our public data suggest that they never paid for laundry and 82 percent never paid for meals but kind of interesting is in nationally representative samples of Americans I also find similar effect with about 17 percent saying they never outsource their dislike task to others or spend money to outsource or just like tasks other than we're seeing similar results here.

[00:23:04]
The maximum willingness to pay for time saving services valued at about $10.00 of us dollars was about 6 can $600.00 Kenyan shillings or 6 us dollars And again that's actually kind of comparable to some of the experiments I've run in the us where if you ask people what's the amount of money that you'd be equally satisfied with the time saving service like housecleaning versus cash people say I would need $120.00 house cleaning service to to have a similar emotional benefit with 60 our cash and we're seeing that kind of discounting here as well so just kind of thing this time saving service the exist people say that they would be helpful for them but they're not typically purchasing them by themselves in part because of the financial constraints they experience so I surveyed a recruited 1500 employees mothers living in Nairobi Kenya who received the following treatments once a week for 3 consecutive weeks of the course of the 6 weeks that is the little bit about the experimental science.

[00:24:02]
So they were randomly assigned to receive a peer control condition an unconditional cash transfer condition or a time saving that your condition the unconditional cash transfer was valued at about $5.00 us per day or about 2 days of paid labor for women in the sample and the factors for time saving services were equally matched on cost to administer so the value of the time saving services was valued at $500.00 Schillings as well we went through a lot of design to feed the possibilities on these experimental designs and the study did go through peer reviews that changed our design a little bit I'd be happy to entertain questions around the m. But this is where we've landed it's what's really important is that we focus on time saving services based on extensive pilot data when really interesting we ask women what their most if like tours were that they'd want to get rid of and then we also asked what if there was other positive extra allergies that occur from these time saving services so that's pretty interesting as for example women really didn't like taking the trash.

[00:25:06]
Out they really didn't like going to the the the jump but because it was very unsafe and during and I'm pregnant they had to do it quite often given that they didn't have similar mechanisms for disposing garbage all the stories through but it was a highly social activity so they didn't actually want to pay to get rid of it it had this positive extra anality of that social experience and so we were really careful to try to of course is in the field experiments it's not perfectly controlled but we're very careful to collect timesaving ballots or to use timesaving vouchers rather that removed negative chores and removed the burden of unpaid labor quite significantly so both laundry meals save women about 7 to 9 hours on average each week but that didn't remove a positive experience for women so in this case they didn't remove positive social experience this so that's how we landed on the 2 time thinking about things that we used in the study which were meals and laundry.

[00:26:01]
And again as I briefly mention unconditional cash transfers have been shown to have benefits for subjective well being and reductions in stress engagement with paid employment and increased earnings and they also have low overhead so in the Kenyan context they have and peso which is basically Bendel which makes transferring money between organizations and individuals very simple and between individuals and various vendors also very simple and mobile penetration rates in Kenya or about 90 percent so everyone has a cell phone everyone has been paid and this makes it very easy to administer and conditional cash transfers part of the reason why it's so beneficial in this context so we thought that this was a really conservative control condition if we could see that the benefits of time saving gougers were similar in magnitude or greater than cash particularly in this context given the unconditional cash transfers women could presumably spend however they like we think that that provided a pretty stringent controls condition by which to compare our time saving vouchers against the this is just to kind of show the 3 conditions again in the I already mentioned that there matched on cost to administer so how the heck did we do this study.

[00:27:12]
We worked with that implementation partner Kabera town center they're a nonprofit based right in a not right in Canberra right in Nairobi Kenya and they happened to have both a laundromat and a restaurant this was an initially what we thought we were going to do in terms of our implementation of the time saving we thought we were going to open up our own restaurant or have a laundromat ever only run exactly sure how we're going to implement these time saving services in this context in particular but we were able to partner with a nonprofit organization Kabera which provided the services of a similar idea that we had that might actually really help the women in this community in particular they also have a computer lab and we ran over baseline and line surveys out of these rooms.

[00:27:57]
This to show you so week one we conducted a series of baseline measures we could have 5 women received either the unconditional cash transfer of the time saving voucher or randomly assigned to the neutral control condition which did not receive any factors of any time kind but did receive a small show up for you so they received about $10.00 to $20.00 shillings for each time point measure they completed so they didn't receive nothing and this is a point that all returns back to in a moment and then we at week 6 the week after the treatments had ended we measured while being stressed relationship conflicts again and that served as our time to measure so we did pre-register 3 study outcomes as I mentioned subjective well being perceived stress or relationship conflict we predicted that time would be cash and both of those conditions would be the control as we terminated data collection 50 participants short to the lockdowns to the pandemic but we got pretty close to our goal of $1600.00 participants that were pre-registered and then we also measured a whole bunch of an exploratory individual difference measures that we thought might important the expense which individuals were able to capitalize on the free time that they were given by mention in some of my earlier work time saving services promote happiness in part because they allow people to spend their time in happier ways so it's possible one of the mechanisms by which time saving might produce positive benefits is allowing women to spend more time on positive activities like paid work or socialising as opposed to so basically substituting that of the burden of unpaid labor all these tours that they were doing with more positive use of the time in this particular context which is their little unknown we weren't sure sure if women were going to get more emotional benefit out of paid work or more time spent socializing.

[00:29:41]
It's also possible that individuals who own their own business might and their time is more fungible they can more easily turn their time and money might benefit more from time saving services that we looked at that possibility as well it's interesting that some of the women who are already making time saving services in our data which as I mentioned weren't that many of us percent happen to be entrepreneurs they would often people in their neighborhood to go run errands on their behalf so they could spend more time selling vegetables that gave us a sigh DHEA that small business owners might benefit most from time saving and then we also looked at potential negative still over effects like decrease quality of relationship with friends of other friends around you start asking you for money this might create conflict or if the cooking or meal of the laundry services might cause some conflicts.

[00:30:26]
Between you and those are around us we also tested for the potential of negative spillover. This is a busy slide to say we focus mostly on busy working moms and we needed them to spend at least some time engaged in these activities that time saving vouchers or were meant to buy themselves out of the meals and laundry they had to cook they had to do laundry every week they also had to have less than 7 members love of living in their household and they had to have a school age child and the reason why we've built in these 2 criteria were twofold we needed women to.

[00:31:02]
We need to make sure that the Democrats are valid triggers would be fully realize it's there's too many people the $500.00 or the $500.00 shillings would not cover all of the laundry or meals that women needed in that particular context and then they also needed to stay around for the duration of our study in a highly mobile population so having that a kid in school helped with attrition in our study that's just a little bit about our participants I think 2 key points to know if they do score quite high on says you're depressed absence of knowledge you really consistent with the stressful environment that they're all in and they also make about $400.00 u.s. dollars per month so it's just something that's a good line.

[00:31:45]
So we didn't find any evidence for differential attrition we were really pleased to see that there was quite difficult to as you can imagine to run a Wanted to Know field experiment in this context so only 7 percent did not return for end line which was consistent with our pre-registered plan and there was no difference in any demographic or psychological measures that time one and time 2 between those we retain those who dropped out are analyses are based on the following and of people who made it all the way through the study over sampled time saving and if we have time at the end of the talk I'll talk about why we did that.

[00:32:19]
And there's no evidence again for a differential attrition in study so again pretty positive in terms of both our ability to retain and our ability to retain people with similar demographic characteristics across all of our conditions and across over the course of the study our manipulation check was also successful so we asked people the extent to which the time saving vs cash remove their burden of unpaid labor and women to receive the time saving vouchers did save us time saving vouchers reduce the burden of unpaid labor which is manipulation check for our experimental design so now we're getting into our pre-registered analysis finally the study design is quite complicated so I want to make sure to walk all of the threads so these are condition differences time to so app week 6 adjusted for baseline to be conservative and what we find is no significant difference across conditions at Time to on any of the subjective well being the stress or the relationship conflict measures that we examined and it also didn't differ depending on whether women were randomly assigned a good deal of laundry or meals over the course of the study women there was no difference across those 2 versions of our time saving about your condition we also did not find any effect on relationship satisfaction a time to adjust to pretend one.

[00:33:39]
And then we started to look at what Meg maybe some of these effects were driven by the fact that some women were benefitting more than others who wanted to look at some of these exploratory analysis based on individual differences so education levels did not shape the benefits if anything women who are more educated in the sciences timesaving voucher conditions reported significantly higher relationship conflict at the end of the study suggesting that maybe they wanted those services more in the future and work were engaging in some interest of full bargaining behavior we don't have direct evidence on this but I'm conducting a field experiment now and to try to understand helpful dynamics shaping well being that if it's entrepreneurship interesting ways somewhat undermine the benefits the women who own their own small business reported slight decline subjective wellbeing over the course of the study if there are signs of the time saving potentially they thought they were thinking about substitution ability if they could have gotten cash they might have been able to check that into their businesses so this is a result that's worth further exploration we also found some evidence that the relationship between the relationship and wellbeing benefits for the last for women who were experiencing really high levels of stress that time one in the time saving condition and this might be the case that women who are experiencing stress in this context are particularly financially constrained and so it could be the case that there were the ones that are most likely to report high levels of stress so the time saving didn't help them remove that source of stress and as a result somewhat undermined wellbeing as opposed to contribute positively.

[00:35:13]
And then I also wanted to look at timings of crises so I looked at they find time these interactions the participants who spent more time on unpaid labor at time one benefited more from the time saving vs unconditional cash transfer condition so you can see that the amount of time spent on unpaid labor is on the x. in relationship satisfaction is on the wives and women who are assigned to the time saving service conditions reported greater time to relationship satisfaction at the end of the study if they engage in war on tape labor at the beginning of the study this is consistent with some research I have looking at the benefit of time saving services that relationship satisfaction in North American contests.

[00:35:49]
Now the tiniest research is pretty interesting here and so I looked at the correlation between time use and well being within the time saving got your condition adjusted for baseline So what these correlations tell us is that for women who are randomly assigned to the time saving voucher condition and who spent more time working in commuting over the course of the study this additional time spent working over the course of the study was associated with higher subjective wellbeing greater positive aspect and lower negative aspects we also see that women who are assigned to the time saving about your condition and who engage in more passive leisure over the course of the study so do you kinds of subjective well being and positive aspects suggesting that women who were able to weild to reap the wellbeing benefits of meals and laundry were ones who were able to spend more time working they drive more emotional satisfaction from working and commuting and we don't see these effects in the control conditions for the cash transfer condition and so this is pretty interesting there are some research suggesting and what is also noticeable here is that women in this study did not benefit from active leisure in a way that we might see in the North American sample they benefited emotionally from spending more time over the course of the study engaged in work and commuting but they did not necessarily benefit from engaging in more active leader like socialising volunteering and exercising so this goes with some recent research that my lab has showing that in areas with high Protestant work ethic where work is rary important to one's identity which is the case in Kenya that people get more satisfaction from working and they do not reap the happiness benefits of engaging in acts of leisure and very interesting we were observing a similar pattern here where women who are able to take time saving services and capitalize on that time by spending more time working are enjoying greater wellbeing benefits.

[00:37:49]
But active leisure socializing doesn't really seem to be contributing to happiness in the sample which is pretty interesting compared to what we know about the pressure pressure to do measure child or family time. Are included in yeah so that maybe aren't. So childcare is in our necessities bucket.

[00:38:13]
So the way I've classified it is active leisure socializing volunteering. Exercising and then path of leisure is relaxing resting napping necessities of childcare cooking cleaning. So I actually haven't run the subset analysis looking just at whether in the benefits of childcare increase over the course of the study for women the time saving service condition but I think that would be really interesting.

[00:38:40]
Thanks to a question from Kim Ok Chris. So what we see the summary of the initial results is there's no effective unconditional cash transfers or time saving versus controlling time to outcomes but time saving vouchers the giving the old meals and laundry to women in the increased time to wellbeing when women completed more unpaid labor at time one and when women were able to spend more time working and less time impassively your activities time saving vouchers also seem to undermine time to wellbeing when women work for themselves and when they experience chronic stress at a time one.

[00:39:17]
Now I don't want to leave us on a depressing note here this isn't a no effect paper actually so what we see is that all of the conditions for all 3 vs subjective well being perceived stress the relationship complex all 3 conditions when you collapse across the are significantly leading to long term significant increases on these metrics for women who participated in the study so there isn't necessarily differences across condition and line but all of the conditions seem to be positively benefiting women in meaningful ways in ways that last and persist at least $1.00 to $2.00 weeks after the treatments and in terms of their subjective wellbeing their perceived stress and reducing the relationship complex so we can see that more in some of these follow up analysis you can see that there are significant baseline and line differences on that aspect so the sense which people experience more positive emotion and less negative emotions you can see their positive emotion increases over the course of the study and it does decrease once we take the treatments away but it doesn't go all the way back to be fine and this is true for all of the condition assignments cash unconditional cast or story unconditional cash transfers time saving and controlled conditions we see similar effects of perceived stress and similar effects with relationship conflict so you can see that we're significantly improving these outcomes but the condition assignments are not significantly differing from one another so they suggest different and direct path subjects us for these different kinds of interventions so we did see again that timesaving increased while being in additional Now also when it reduced the burden of unpaid labor so women felt less stressed out by the chores that they had to complete but not necessarily the actual hourly reductions in paid labor so it was really about the psychological experience of unpaid labor not undermining their wellbeing as much and this is consistent with some of my previous research showing that the emotional benefits of time saving services are not coming from the objective amount of time you're saving they're coming from the psychological feeling of having more time available and we see some more effect here and also reduce the desire for women of wanting more time in the day which in turn produce wellbeing benefits and increased the amount of hours worked per week in the satisfaction that women got from those hours Ok so it takeaways we see that small cash transfers are control condition large cash transfers and time saving vouchers all produce meaningful increases in wellbeing reductions in stress and reductions in relationship conflict for the working women that we studies.

[00:41:44]
More research is now needed to under unpack the psychological mechanisms especially between the small and large cash transfer conditions but they mention the control condition receive the money it was only about 3 percent of their monthly income the cash transfer condition received a 30 percent on top of their monthly income food but both the 2.4 percent and the 30 percent is producing significantly meaningful well being benefits here so could be the case that women in the control conditions felt like they were working for pay and earning money which produced some psychological benefit and this is related to an idea in the development economics literature of workfare versus welfare for giving people the opportunity to work for pay can produce significant increases in the objective well being so we might be observing that that might be why our control condition is actually improving well being to a similar extent as our control and our time saving condition but definitely something I'm going to be pursuing a preacher work to try to understand there were some friction costs associated with the meals and laundry and our follow up measures occurred 5 to 10 days after treatments we might see the some of the immediate benefits of the treatments might be washed out by the time that we get to our time too although you know our week to week analysis sort of rule that out not exactly what's going on in the data but could account for some of the weaker effects across condition at times too in our pre-registered analysis so I'm currently what working on ongoing research looking at larger more sustained timesaving forms of Aids so we did a pretty good job of giving people pretty significant unconditional cash transfers and fairly significant services that reduce the burden of unpaid labor but we could do better and so we're currently running a long term project in Russia done in rural villages in India where we're looking at the long term wellbeing and education and health effects of water technology that saves girls and women 7 to 10 hours a day so there's these rainwater collection tanks that preclude women from having to go to the well every day too.

[00:43:44]
Go and get. Go and fetch well water every day these rainwater question to make it so that women don't have to do that also in this context suddenly everyone in the household which is really important so the household support shape the wellbeing benefits we saw some relationship conflict measures especially for educational highly educated women go up as a result of receiving time saving So now we'll be able to actually model within the household effects and look at what there is the extent to which in other individuals in the household supports those times saving services are a critical ingredient in subjective well being benefits and whether the social acceptability of work also shapes the wellbeing benefits of the girls and women in the study so in the research I'm studying 100 families 5 members for households 50 are receiving water collecting technology and 50 are eligible but are not going to receive it in one year they're going to receive it in the next year so this is a massive control design and in addition to subjective well being also be able to look at crop fields school attendance and clinics but this focus is going to extend this current program of research it's currently running during covert my field experiments experiment team and it's really amazing so it's just one quick picture and if anyone's interested the organization I'm working with is called One prosper so you can click click that link and find out more.

[00:45:05]
And then I also have some research trying to understand disparities in time use and well being during this course experiment and working from home we've been invited revision on a paper looking at time use them while being during the. Current code contests and what we find is women worldwide are engaging in more unpaid labor regardless of whether or not they have kids and regardless of the extent to which the country that they live in has a gala Tarion or not women are spending about 8 percent more time cooking and cleaning and then the next year this will result in 12 more days of Tory's compared to men and women on average are also spending 3 percent less time going outdoors and working out as compared to men and in the next year this will result in 5 less days of active leisure and overall women are feeling more distracted and less productive that they're spending more of their work days.

[00:45:53]
Dealing with distractions and feeling less productive and this is true we've had workers from saying the u.s. Brazil other countries u.s. representative samples and Canada and these bars are destroying the increase self reported increases we have longed to know data too but these are just to self reported increases in the stuff of these like child care and housework over the course of the work from home period of time you can see everyone is reporting these higher levels of necessity and less leisure but the results are more striking for women than for men.

[00:46:25]
And so we are currently looking at interventions that we could run at scale to empower women and workplaces to encourage employees to negotiate for more time at the individual level to get more work done and removing the burden of a good labor for women worldwide as these results suggest it is likely to have critical downstream benefits for workplace equality.

[00:46:45]
And just to kind of even a couple of points from the 3 some paper that we have we've shown that stress is on the rise so global wealth has increased but this is not necessarily made life easier since 2008 stresses ribbons risen from 44 percent to 55 percent and we find that some of the stress can be ameliorated at the side a level by shifting more respondents from being work in productivity focus to being more leisure and family focus so in data that we published last year from the World Values Survey find that countries with a higher response percentage of respondents who value leisure over work have countries that are happier and report a greater percent of respondents having higher life satisfaction regardless of g.d.p. and related to stress point individuals who live in countries with a higher percent of respondents who say they value leisure over work also were better able to weather the 2008 economic recession so their wellbeing was less negatively impact.

[00:47:41]
So in summary I you know a lot of my research suggests that you know well in general time is the most important resource that people have and yet as individuals and as policymakers and leaders in our organizations we often believe that money will result in greater happiness and my data here even that I presented today suggests that it can hover Free want to move the needle on societal level happiness and reduce the relationship between stress and on happiness we also need to see time and leisure as a path to lower stress and greater wellbeing and so I'll leave the talk there and leave some time for questions at the hands thank you so much for your time today.

[00:48:25]
Thank you had some tech there. Yeah well. So if anyone has any questions feel free to yourself then. Ask away we've got about 9 ish minutes for any of the questions since. So this is Chris Martin I have a question can you hear me well. Ok this is related more to the introductory part of your talk where you're talking about your research in Western nations but it's not about the study per se but there's some more China is in us and it's so you have a liaison for showing the meeting as a sign of status and industrialized nations now I'm going to do a little work on this myself and I'm finding that not so much in a nice but time in years past lifetimes Plus there's enough.

[00:49:27]
If you're just sleep deprived because you're part time management that's been on a hunger status have you done work. Using out. People being busy for the sake of status or people talking about business for the sake of status and people actually being unable to manage their time how another word in terms of a person that's going to take actors pushing dizziness.

[00:49:57]
I haven't done research on this in general in my research but this is really interesting so that paper I'm quite familiar with they find that. The. Projection of being busy is seen as a high status symbol and us but not in European context the production of relaxation and leisure is seen as high status but I love the idea of crossing that with sort of the origins of time affluence if you will in the way that you're thinking about it so it should be the case that if we think that your report time manager.

[00:50:31]
Then we won't come for you with higher status but if we think that you're a great time manager and very busy maybe that's when you see this high status a merge but maybe that's the norm that business is good that dominates Still us work cultures so Mike Norton has a research paper showing that leisure equals.

[00:50:52]
Laziness police are quite predominant and can undermine the extent to which individuals enjoy the leisure activities that they have available and the extent to which they see leisure as a sign of success in general so I would predict that you regardless of sort of why you're busy or not that someone who has seems to have a lot of time available but would would not necessarily be seen as successful if people whole dislike leisure is laziness belief we also showed So in this paper that I was mentioning in the talk with George why it is believed that mit a p.c. and in economics we find that these reserves leave the beliefs are more pervasive in more protestant work ethic areas so we're looking at the role of work hours and how much your peers work for influencing the extent to which you yourself experience enjoyment from leisure but also the extent to which you see leisure as something desirable so in places where your peers are working a lot you enjoy leisure less and enjoy working more and there's lots of the negative association between stress and well being.

[00:51:56]
But just. Well you know a solution to poverty is a big where everyone else have no life too. But you know it would kind of see. Just that some of the effects that you might observe might be moderated by these critical individual differences to the extent that people see leisure as lazy so it's like maybe that believe in and of itself trumps whether or not you think someone's busy because they're being in a fish and versus a fish and maybe it doesn't actually matter in places where these are seen as lazy but the words in of that business and so I think it's a super interesting question and.

[00:52:43]
Ok. I do have a question through a simple reason though for just a little bit but I wonder if you find. What's the lowest barrier to entry and in service time saving activities specially within an inch of Western context as we see them as usually you know I find those potential for lack of value in the time saving services so are there certain activities more generally that people are more likely to invest into and or you know maybe there's some sort of individual differences that are likely to to predict their preference for these times we've been very active ethics Yeah so my just Artesian research focused on an individual difference question and I found pretty robust evidence that people who have a general proclivity to value time over money are more likely to spend time in happier ways like socialising they invest and this is not just self reported so it's not just a social desirable responding effect when we watch people interacting in a lab people have a time value are more likely to spend more of that time socializing as opposed to working or trying to be productive.

[00:53:59]
And they're also in some of my larger scale correlational data people who are more time focused in general also tend to be more likely to make time savings purchase that is then to make the time saving tradeoffs in a way that will give up money to have more time consistent with the kind of general value or preference in terms of why people often don't give up money in order to have more time and whether they're sort of activity people are more or less better at I do think pretty consistent evidence but much like a lot of consumer decisions people are not very good at spontaneously recognizing opportunity cost so that means people are kind of you know thinking a lot about the cost to them of giving up a financial resource but not necessarily thinking about what what not giving up a financial reserves to have more time might mean though that means you're going to be stuck spending a few terrible hours cleaning your house on the weekend when you write much rather just have leisure time instead and some people are not very good at making that opportunity.

[00:54:54]
Costs value for themselves but especially really there's a time as opposed to money and when we tried to manipulate people or kind of sounded wrong when we try to like intervene on these values and push people to make more time saving purchases what's really interesting is that you want to just remind people that giving up this money to save time means that you could have more time to do anything else when we tried to constrain what people think about in terms of they could spend more time working or more time socializing we don't see positive effect I think people really like to keep open the possibility of a lot of different time uses when they're thinking about future time so we've had the most success with interventions that remind people of the opportunity cost of forgoing a time saving service like you won't be able to spend as much time with your kids we also find that pro-social orientation really helps people feel pretty guilty giving out money to have more free time in part because you know money they people think about spending money on more utilitarian goods and time is more for Donek they don't really want to give up this resource that could go to other demands in their life or something that sort of they're not exactly sure what they're going to do with it or anything like that but if you remind them of the pro-social element that by outsourcing and saving yourself time you're better able to spend time with your friends or family or you're a better partner because you're less stressed out then that sort of offsets it's negative feels the facts and people are more likely or more willing to give up money to have more free time you know so kind of emphasizing the more you demonic components of having this free time with a term for children short shorts much moves.

[00:56:30]
Exactly yeah other things to help quite a lot. Yeah well I know you have a hard stuff as well and so I want to give you I guess a minute before the next thing so thank you for that thank you so much for the great yeah and if you have any thoughts or are.

[00:56:49]
Feel free to send me an email I'm happy to chat more offline. Super interesting and well on that note I'll let you go and you're about to be influx with thank yous from the Czech. President Well thank you so much everyone very thoughts that I look forward to hearing from you know they care they care.