What is it about?
This study examines how individuals allocate time to financial activities and how these activities relate to their positive or negative emotions. The full text is available free from the journal website.
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Why is it important?
One key contribution of this study is to foreground time spent on financial activities — such as paying bills, budgeting, and banking — as a critical yet underexplored dimension of economic behavior. Our results reveal substantial socioeconomic and demographic disparities in both the time devoted to financial activities and the emotional experience associated with them.
Perspectives
Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we find that financial tasks occupy a minimal share of daily time — averaging just 8.3 minutes — yet are associated with elevated stress and low happiness. Despite their negative emotional valence, financial activities are perceived as meaningful. Research reveals that time spent on financial tasks increases with education and income, and varies by gender, employment status, and race. Furthermore, affective experiences during financial activities differ significantly across sociodemographic characteristics; compared to women, men report more both negative and positive emotions, while higher educated people tend to have fewer negative emotions.
Dr. Jing Jian Xiao
University of Rhode Island
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emotions related to time use in financial activities: Affective patterns in the US, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, June 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbef.2026.101181.
You can read the full text:
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