Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
An Alternative Valuation Method for Non-Market Production
Department
Economics Department
College
Seidman College of Business
Date Range
2014-2015
Disciplines
Business
Abstract
Current techniques for valuing non-market production provide biased estimates of the value of human time spent outside the market environment. These biased estimates cause problems for applications which need to quantify the economic contribution of unpaid, non-market, and household labor. For example, the legal system measures economic losses to families and households from the injury or death of a member, while policy decision-makers evaluate the impacts of economic growth on consumer welfare. This bias in valuing non-market effort is particularly troublesome for analyzing consumer spending choices, poverty, and the effects of changing labor force participation rates by sex. We present an alternative valuation method which provides more realistic estimates of the productivity and value of effort performed by non-specialists. We estimate the distribution of market wages as a function of experience. Those distributions are then combined with data from time use surveys to value the output of non-specialist, non-market providers. A discussion of existing techniques is included.
Conference Name
51st Annual Conference
Conference Location
St. Louis, MO
ScholarWorks Citation
Lowen, Aaron and Sicilian, Paul, "An Alternative Valuation Method for Non-Market Production" (2015). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 528.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/528
