Valuing people's time is a key challenge in a lot of applied micro development work. Farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, informal traders and caregivers, all work on their own account, without a pay slip. Yet, there has been surprisingly little attention devoted to the "how" of valuing people's time in settings where we do not observe a wage. Enters a new NBER working paper by Agness, Baseler, Chassang, Dupas and Snowberg.

Their results have direct, practical implications when trying to value time spent in self employment: they measure the size of the bias individuals apply when considering the monetary value of the time they spend working on their own farm, such that it can be removed from the market wage to provide a more accurate measure of time spent on a job of one's own. Some key features of the paper. First, it involves lottery tickets to win an irrigation pump. Second, it is a great reference guide on approaches to elicit individual preferences in an experiment. Finally, it delivers an actual rule of thumb to value the time people spend in self-employed tasks! - blogs.worldbank.org

A version of this article appears in the print on February 18, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.