Could leisure be considered a Giffen good? One of my microeconomics fellow students asked this and it got me thinking. The leisure demand curve is a mirror of the labour supply curve. In the section where the Income Effect is greater than the Substitution Effect, would leisure be considered a Giffen good as well as an inferior good? Because the price of undertaking leisure is your wage.
I have two sources here:

Argument by David Friedman: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Chapter_5/PThy_Chapter_5.html

EDIT:
From the link:

An increase in wages (say, from \$10/hour to \$11/hour) has two effects. It makes leisure more costly--each hour not worked means \$11 less income instead of \$10. That is an argument for working more hours at the higher salary. But at the same time, the increased wage means that the producer is wealthier--and is therefore inclined to consume more leisure. It is possible for the second effect to outweigh the first, in which case the increased wage causes a decrease in hours worked, as shown in Figure 5-4. This is called a backward-bending supply curve for labor; the backward-bending portion is from F to G (and presumably above G). The result, in the case of a single producer, would be a supply curve for goods that sloped in the wrong direction; for some range of goods, higher prices would generate less output instead of more.

This is not the first time we have seen a conflict between income and substitution effects. In Chapter 3, the same situation generated a Giffen good--a good whose demand curve sloped in the wrong direction. I argued that there were good reasons not to expect to observe Giffen goods in real life. Those reasons do not apply to the backward-bending supply curve for labor.
One of the reasons was that while we expect consumption of most goods to go up when income goes up, a Giffen good must be a good whose consumption goes down with increasing income--an inferior good. Indeed, it must be so strongly inferior that the income effect of an increase in its price (which, since we are buying it, is equivalent to a decrease in real income) outweighs the substitution effect. Our labor is something we are selling, not buying; an increase in its price (the wage rate) makes us richer not poorer, and so inclined to buy more leisure. So the backward-bending supply curve for labor only requires leisure to be a normal good.


Argument and diagram by unknown:
http://people.bath.ac.uk/ak220/teaching/labor%20supply.pdf
EDIT
From the link:


Suppose now that the wage someone receives goes up, (Diagram II). Obviously, this also increases the cost of leisure since the opportunity cost for not working is the wage you don’t get. So, since leisure has become more expensive, the worker increases his working time. This is the (negative) substitution effect. At the same time, there is also an income effect coming from the fact that since your wage increased, your whole wage income increased$^2$.Thus, the income effect will tempt the
worker to increase his/her leisure. Be careful here: Leisure became more expensive
but the income effect is positive. Remember that when we were talking about a
normal good X, an increase in price would have caused both effects to be negative.
I’ll explain this contradiction later.
An increase in the wage will cause the budget line to pivot upwards to the new
position MoM1. The consumer now is on the new indifferent curve $I_1$. As you can see,
he has both increased his leisure and his consumption! Let’s decompose this effect.
The substitution effect will make the worker work more, $Q_0$ to $Q_2$. However, the
income effect will push in the opposite direction, $Q_2$ to $Q_1$. Since the I.E. over weights
the S.E., the consumer will increase his leisure.

This worker’s reaction was actually determined by the IE, since the SE would always
motivate the worker to work more. For a different worker, the IE could have acted in
the same direction as the S.E. Clearly, this depends on where the indifference curves
lie on the diagram, their shape (preferences) and the level of non wage income. Suppose a worker possesses a very significant source of non wage income. Obviously,
he would react more smoothly in a wage increase than someone who relies solely on
his wage income.
For a particular level of wage, a worker would be indifferent between working and
not working at all. This wage is called reservation wage and depends on the level of
the non wage income, keeping preferences constant.
Finally, few comments on the contradiction I mentioned before:
Suppose we have good X which is normal and its price increases. There is a decrease
in the consumption of the good since the good became more expensive in relation to
other goods. (Substitution effect). There is also a decrease in the consumption of the
good because of the income effect, since the real income decreased and the good is
normal. Consequently the one effect adds to the other and the total effect is negative.
Now in X’s position we have Leisure, assuming that leisure is a normal good. If its
price increases (increase in wage) then leisure becomes more expensive so the worker
would want to consume less of it (work more). On the other hand the income effect motivates the worker to increase his/her leisure instead of reducing it (as it was the
case with good X). Who is wrong here?
Apparently none! In the conventional model of goods X and Y we are concerned with
people who consume the goods and do not sell those goods. In contrast, an individual
not only consumes leisure but also “sells” it to an employer (in which case it is called
work time). Thus when the price of leisure increases, it may become more expensive
to consume but at the same time the consumer benefits from selling it at a higher
price! Thus, the income effect can be either positive or negative depending on
consumer’s preferences and particularly on how much leisure he sells in relation to
how much he consumes.

In (2)[Diagram II] it seems that IE&gt;SE but optimal choice of leisure is increasing. Seems that leisure is normal here.