Valuing Unpaid Child Care in the U.S.: A Prototype Satellite Account Using the American Time Use Survey

This paper builds on previous satellite accounts that treat households as production units, but challenges their measurement and valuation of time devoted to child care, making a case for the inclusion of supervisory child care time that does not overlap with other productive activities. We also suggest several other methodological refinements for estimates based on analysis of data from the A merican T ime U se S urvey: application of a vector of specialized replacement cost wage estimates for different child care activities rather than a single wage, and adjustments for the ratio of children to adults present and for the educational attainment of caregivers. Our estimates of the value of child care alone in 2004 and 2010 exceed previous estimates of the value of all non‐market household production in the U . S . The end result is an upward adjustment of Gross Domestic Product by about 43 percent compared to previous adjustments of about 26 percent.