Affiliations: [a] Department of Family and Consumer Economics,
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA. Tel.: +1 573 882 9652; Fax: +1
573 884 8389; Email: [email protected]
| [b] Department of Consumer Sciences, Box 870158, The
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0158, USA. Tel.: +1 205 348 7954;
Fax: +1 205 348 3789; Email: [email protected]
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author.
Abstract: Household production is typically measured by estimating the time that the
homemaker spends in the various household activities. The focus in this paper
was on valuating the household production time of Canadian full-time homemakers.
Four variants of the opportunity cost approach, namely, imputed wage, potential
wage, Heckman's two-stage reservation wage, and Kidd's reservation wage were
used to estimate and compare homemaker's time. The results indicate that the
four different variants yielded different estimates of the value of household
production time. One of the main conclusions is that Heckman's two-stage
reservation wage approach, albeit having the advantage of correcting selection
bias, it produced a wide range for the estimated reservation wage, which led us
to doubt its reliability as a practical measure of the value of household
production time.
Keywords: Household production time, opportunity cost approach, reservation wage
