Third Meeting Notes
(Gretchen's Notes)
James' presentation
A motivation for wanting to give a monetary value to unpaid work is the problem of “marrying your housekeeper.” Before, all housekeeping services were paid for and counted as production in the economy. After, if still unpaid the value of that productive work disappears.
Big difference cross nationally between how much production is paid or unpaid. Look at care of young children – Sweden (lots of marketization) vs Germany (lots of home care, or maybe this just applies in the former W Germany?). The arbitrary difference between paid and unpaid work in the NIPA becomes an arbitrary difference in NTA.
Data issues: Some places have TU surveys that ask for time information on all age 15+ persons, some just use one selected reference person in the household.
Resources: Center for TU Research, Dr. Kimberly Fischer – keeps the database
Dividing unpaid work from nonwork activities – 3rd person criterion (things that can be outsourced). Could you pay someone else to do it?
- Sleep? No!
- Cooking? Yes!
- Gray areas like childcare, gardening (some of it is pleasure, gives its own utility, but some of it is work) Also part of criterion that a 3rd person could benefit from the activity?
Multinational Time Use Survey – tried to put common format onto TU surveys from different countries.
Gross/net opportunity cost – difference is taxes and cost of work (commuting, work clothes, fringe benefits)
What about people who do more than one activity at a time? What about people who do the same activity (two people doing childcare together)? How to deal with these? Often in surveys you have primary and secondary activity but the current common practice is to take the primary activity only.
Time spent with elderly person but not in your household?
How to actually add unpaid labor to NTA?
- Step 1: unpaid labor income profile
- Step 2: estimate consumption profile
- Step 3: transfers using NTA intrahh transfer algorithm
What if you are helping your elderly relative who lives outside of the household? Then I can’t just apportion the unpaid labor within the household! Assign to age of relative and it's an interhh transfer. If you don't know age of elderly recipient then assign to giver's age + average generation length?
PLANNED RESEARCH PROJECTS?
Hungary: wanted to measure asymmetry between time transfers to children vs elderly, elder care more easily monetized compared to care of young children; they have cross-section but would like lifecycle measure, find out why women have flatter age-wage curve; examine artifact that the cost of raising children at the n-th child if you use opportunity cost is automatically higher (you have higher wage at 3rd child than at 1st just because of the age-wage curve)
Uruguay and India also have plans for projects.
WHAT ABOUT "REGULAR" NTA BY GENDER?
Can get difference in YL by gender from survey. On consumption side we are sort of stuck with unitary model? At least on private side. On Public side we can often get specific data on age profiles broken out by sex. NEED TO LOOK AT ECONOMETRIC LITERATURE FOR ANY WAY TO THINK ABOUT OTHER PRIVATE CONSUMPTION? COULD YOU USE A DATA DRIVEN METHOD?
Sweden used different equivalence scales for men and women based on consumer data?
BIG QUESTION - What do people really want to know when they ask if you have done NTA by gender? Elderly care and the substitution of public versus private care? Whether need for big care transfers distort labor markets?
What does GA do????