Direct Valuation of Personal Care by Households

This paper valued the quantity of child, sick, and elderly care provided by households using a new, direct measure. Such measures add to the literature that estimates the size of the contribution of non-market work by household members, particularly women, and to literature about valuation of childcare. This production remains unvalued in standard national income accounts. Traditional attempts to quantify this care multiplied care-giver hours by a wage rate, a method that suffers from several drawbacks, including omitting the contributions of anything but labor, the inability to handle joint production, and the use of an arbitrary wage rate. This study avoided these problems by valuing the amount of care with its market price based on data from a small urban area. The mean value was $3,547 annually (97 percent of it childcare) for all sample households and $9,610 for those providing care. The results afforded evidence of scale economies in parental childcare and quantified care furnished by different kinds of providers.     

Do Household Heads Speak for the Household? A Research Note

Many recent household surveys include questions about respondents’ subjective well-being. Nearly all of them, however, pose these questions only to the household head. This paper addresses an issue with practical and methodological concerns. Can survey designers ask only household heads and expect them to accurately represent the living conditions of the entire household? Using South Africa’s 1998 October Household Survey (OHS) to estimate econometric models of subjective well-being, this paper finds that the response of household heads is determined largely by factors shared by the entire household – housing, for example – and not on those experienced primarily by the head – individual health status, for example. This suggests that South African household heads are truly reporting household well-being, rather than their individual level of satisfaction. While this result probably cannot be widely generalized, the testing methodology is replicable and could be applied to similarly structured data sets.     

Buy or burn?: Empirical tests of models of crime using data from a general population

This study tested models of an individual's choice to copy illegally music using survey data from a random sample of adults who acquired recorded music. It added to the short list of studies of crime based on data from a general population sample and formally tested the added predictive power of an augmented crime model containing variables from both the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and rational choice models. The results supported the desirability of using general population samples and the augmented model. Policies that change attitudes and perceived norms have the potential to reduce crime.     

Subjective Well-Being and Household Factors in South Africa

This paper uses a household surveyfrom South Africa to estimate a model ofsubjective well-being based upon poverty andhousehold characteristics including housing,sanitation, and transportation. Following Sen,we allow for factors in addition to income andwe begin to incorporate functionings andcapabilities as determinants of well-being. This study finds that important differencesexist among groups based upon their economicstatus. For the poorest quartilestransportation and housing play the mostimportant role in determining well-being, whilefor the richest quartiles, sanitation, water,energy, education and health are relativelymore important. These results have importantpublic policy implications because many of thefactors affecting well-being have large publicgood components. In addition, these resultscould be used to help governments focus aid inorder to improve well-being.