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Spending Time with Daniel Hamermesh

6 August 2019
2.00pm – 3.30pm AEST
UNSW Bookshop
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Where does all your time go? Could you be spending it better?

Come and join us for an afternoon discussion with Daniel Hamermesh, author of Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource where he will shed light onto those dark corners of our minds where time and how we spend it remains eternally mystifying! He'll unpack the mystery of how we spend our time and provide tools on how to reduce stress created by the limitations of time.

About the book

Time is the ultimate scarce resource and thus quintessentially a topic for economics, which studies scarcity. Starting with the observation that time is increasingly valuable given competing demands as we have more things we can buy and do, Spending Time provides engaging insights into how people use their time and what determines their decisions about spending their time. 

That our time is limited by the number of hours in a day, days in a year, and years in our lives means that we face constraints and thus choices that involve trade-offs. We sleep, eat, have fun, watch TV, and not least, we work. How much we dedicate to each, and why we do so, is intriguing and no one is better placed to shed light on similarities and differences than Daniel S. Hamermesh, the leading authority on time-use. Here he explores how people use their time, including across countries, regions, cultures, class, and gender.

About the author

Daniel S. Hamermesh is a Distinguished Scholar of Barnard College and the Network Director at the Institute of the Study of Labour (IZA). He is an emeritus professor of economics at Royal Holloway University of London, and the University of Texas at Austin. He also taught at Michigan State University, Princeton University and has held visiting professorships at universities in Europe, Asia and Australia. His research is published in over 100 refereed papers in scholarly journals and has concentrated on time use, labour demand, discrimination, academic labour markets and unusual applications of labour economics (to beauty, sleep and suicide). His magnum opus, Labour Demand was published by Princeton University Press in 1993, who also published Beauty Pays in 2011.