The Regional Economic Value of Nonmarket Household Production Time: Combining an I-O Framework with Time Use Date

Since their inception in 1934, the National Income and Product Accounts of the U.S. (NIPAs) have excluded estimates of household production from total economic activity. Many proposals have been made for including the value of household production in the NIPAs, all of which rest on some form of imputed value to be added to Gross Domestic Prod-uct. This paper uses U.S. data from 2006 to determine economy-wide implicit values for the time spent by household members in unpaid household activities, specifically unpaid child care time. I demonstrate a method that combines household time allocation within an Input-Output (I-O) framework to allow for an implicit rather than an imputed valuation of house-hold time. The values for work and work-related time as well as family care time by industry and by occupation are universally large and do not follow a pattern which might be suggested by wages alone.