Content area
Full Text
The Dollar Value of a Day: 1997 Dollar Valuation by Kurt V. Krueger and John O. Ward,Shawnee Mission, Kansas, Expectancy Data, Economic Demographers, 1999.
Plenty has been written about valuing home-based services. At the macro level, United States government agencies as well as international agencies have grappled for decades with the economic dilemma that self-produced services, which have real economic value, are difficult to measure and hence are excluded from national output statistics (Chadeau 1992). At the micro level, people make decisions about employment or homemaking based on their perceptions and valuation (or undervaluation) of self-produced services. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal addressed the continued expansion of work and market purchases in the U.S. as substitutes for home production.
In the micro world of civil litigation, home production is an integral part of the calculation of pecuniary losses that forensic economists are called upon to value. The list of articles devoted to methodological and measurement issues surrounding home production valuation appears to be growing exponentially. This literature may be divided into two broad areas: (1) research that focuses upon conceptual and methodological problems associated with measurement of home production; and (2) papers devoted to data sources and measurement techniques. The Dollar Value of a Day squarely fits within the latter domain, providing a new set of data for practicing forensic economists.
Data sources and the values that are assigned to household production based on these sources have had an evolutionary history. From relatively small samples covering narrow geographic areas, research has steadily widened and deepened to the point where several sources of national data are now regularly tapped in order to develop valuation of household production (see Douglass et al.; Ward). During the 1990s, Michigan University Survey Research Center's Panel Study on Income Dynamcs (PSID) data became a new and significant source of information about household production associated with various economic and demographic characteristics of households. Now along comes The Dollar Value of a Day offering an alternative national data set with yet additional details and nuances.
Dollar Value makes use of time-diary data from a study commissioned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency titled "The National Human Activity Pattern Survey" (NHAPS) and collected via telephone interviews from 1992 to...