Household Production, Leisure and Living Standards

Household production is an important non-market activity and the empirical literature has developed different methods towards valuing household production without, however, providing a rigorous theoretical foundation for the various approaches. We follow the literature spawned by Becker (1965) and develop a model of the household as a producer and consumer that provides a theoretical justification for the two main approaches towards valuing labour in household production, the replacement cost approach and the opportunity cost approach. We provide a justification for the replacement cost approach as a way of valuing labour input into own-account production of households but show also that in general this is an incomplete measure of full consumption. We further develop a cost-of-living index for full consumption and full household income. The consequences of the theoretical model are illustrated by a cross-country comparison, using the data by Ahmad and Koh (2011).