FAMILY

America is becoming a nation of homebodies. In his February 2025 cover story for The Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson dubbed our current era “the anti-social century.” He isn’t wrong. According to our recent research, the U.S. is becoming a nation of homebodies. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we studied how people in the U.S. spent their time before, during and after the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic did spur more Americans to stay home. But this trend didn’t start or end with the pandemic. We found that Americans were already spending more and more time at home and less and less time engaged in activities away from home stretching all the way back to at least 2003. And if you thought the end of lockdowns and the spread of vaccines led to a revival of partying an...

Each season, the celebration of Christmas has religious leaders and conservatives publicly complaining about the commercialization of the holiday and the growing lack of Christian sentiment. Many people seem to believe that there was once a way to celebrate the birth of Christ in a more spiritual way. Such perceptions about Christmas celebrations have, however, little basis in history. As a scholar of transnational and global history, I have studied the emergence of Christmas celebrations in German towns around 1800 and the global spread of this holiday ritual. While Europeans participated in church services and religious ceremonies to celebrate the birth of Jesus for centuries, they did not commemorate it as we do today. Christmas trees and gift-giving on Dec. 24 in Germany did not spre...

Christmas and New Year’s are days of celebration in many parts of the world when people gather with family and friends. One thing many typically don’t celebrate on those days is a birthday. That’s because Dec. 25 is the least popular day in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand to give birth. In England, Wales and Ireland, it’s the second-least popular, behind Dec. 26, when Brits celebrate Boxing Day. So why do people have fewer babies on holidays like Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year’s – the second-least popular birthday in the U.S.? I am personally interested in the question because my wife was a New Year’s Day baby. And as an economist, I find these data puzzles fascinating. Least and most popular birthdays All of the least-favored days in the U.S. are tied to holidays, wheth...

Most super rich couples have bread-winning husbands and stay-at-home wives, contrasting sharply with everyone else. The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea Men are the sole breadwinners in over half of super rich heterosexual couples – defined as those in the top 1% of households – while the women are not employed, according to our new peer-reviewed study. That’s twice the rate of less affluent heterosexual couples. Our finding is based on 30 years of data, from 1989 to 2019, from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. We examined how couples divide work, focusing on three different wealthy groups – the super rich, the just plain rich and the upper middle class, as defined by their wealth percentile, and compared them with those of le...