The impact of home production on economic inequality in Germany

Joachim Frick, Markus Grabka and Olaf Groh-Samberg

Empirical Economics, 2012, vol. 43, issue 3, 1143-1169

Abstract: Using representative income and time-use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from home production and analyze their impact on economic inequality. As an alternative to existing measures, we propose a predicted wage approach that relaxes some of the strong assumptions underlying both the standard opportunity cost approach and the housekeeper wage approach. We also propose a method of adjusting the number of hours spent on home production to reduce the bias arising from multi-tasking and joint production in time-use data. Sensitivity analyses comparing results among different approaches provide indications of method effects. Although this study supports the evidence that considering home production leads to a reduction in inequality, we show that the size of this effect differs according to the variations in the mean and distribution of the estimated monetary value of home production across the three approaches. This finding underscores the need for a harmonized approach in cross-national comparative research. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2012

Keywords: Home production; Non-cash incomes; Economic inequality; SOEP; Time use; D31; D13; I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00181-011-0523-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Home Production on Economic Inequality in Germany (2012)
Working Paper: The Impact of Home Production on Economic Inequality in Germany (2009)
Working Paper: The Impact of Home Production on Economic Inequality in Germany (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:empeco:v:43:y:2012:i:3:p:1143-1169

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-011-0523-7

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().