IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v92y2025i6p3471-3503..html

Valuing the Time of the Self-Employed

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Agness
  • Travis Baseler
  • Sylvain Chassang
  • Pascaline Dupas
  • Erik Snowberg

Abstract

People’s value of their own time is a key input in public policy evaluations—these evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Measuring this value for the self-employed is challenging, as, by definition, it is not priced by the market. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive preferences. As a result, neither market wages nor standard valuation techniques correctly measure participants’ value of time. Using a structural model, we identify the behavioural wedges in participants’ choices and find that distortions appear when households exchange cash either for time or for goods. Our model estimates suggest that valuing the time of the self-employed at 60% of the market wage is a reasonable rule of thumb.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Agness & Travis Baseler & Sylvain Chassang & Pascaline Dupas & Erik Snowberg, 2025. "Valuing the Time of the Self-Employed," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 92(6), pages 3471-3503.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:92:y:2025:i:6:p:3471-3503.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdaf003
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Deutschmann, Joshua W. & Duru, Maya & Siegal, Kim & Tjernström, Emilia, 2025. "Relaxing multiple agricultural productivity constraints at scale," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D10 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - General
    • D19 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:92:y:2025:i:6:p:3471-3503.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.