Effects of work schedule features, social influence and socio-demographic characteristics on job application rates in two-adult households with children

Work schedule arrangements substantially affect traffic flows and associated congestion, particularly during morning and evening peaks. Therefore, the study of work schedule arrangements is relevant to manage congestion, protect the environment, and help governments and companies to develop human resource management policies. Compared to households without children, households with children face more challenges in organizing their daily activities, such as childcare, sending/bringing children to school, playing with children, etc. Participating in these activities does not only increase time pressure in general, but because several of these child-related activities are mandatory, they need to be organized at a fixed time and/or a fixed location. Thus, when parents decide whether to apply for a job, those children-related activities should also be taken into account at least in terms of number of working hours and required travel times for the work commute. Job applications are therefore an important decision before further work time allocation arrangements and household task allocation can be modeled. This paper reports some findings of a study on job applications in two-adults households with children. The aim of this study is to estimate the effects of work attributes, social influence and socio-demographics characteristics on people’s decisions to apply for jobs. To that end, a stated choice experiment is constructed and implemented. The experiment systematically varies work schedule and social influence attributes. Work attributes include the number of working hours / week, flexibility in working hours, interest for the job, salary and travel distance to work. Social influence attributes are defined as opinions from members of the parents’ social network toward time allocation trade-offs between work and children-related activities. Following Rasouli & Timmermans (2013), members of the social network were classified into parents, relatives, friends and peers, to measure how their opinions affect respondents’ job application decisions. Data for a sample of 1051 respondents were collected via a web-based questionnaire in January 2015. A binary logit model is used to estimate the effects of work schedule attribute, social influence and socio-demographic characteristics on the probability of applying for a particular job. Results show that the effects of work attributes and some socio-demographic attributes are more significant than social influence attributes