- Title
- National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life
- Author(s)
- Alan B. Krueger Alan Krueger (Princeton University and NBER)
- Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (Princeton University)
- David Schkade David Schkade (University of California, San Diego)
- Norbert Schwarz Norbert Schwarz (University of Michigan)
- Arthur A. Stone Arthur Stone (Stony Brook University)
- Abstract
- This monograph proposes a new approach for measuring features of society's subjective well-being, based on time allocation and affective experience. We call this approach National Time Accounting (NTA). National Time Accounting is a set of methods for measuring, comparing and analyzing how people spend and experience their time -- across countries, over historical time, or between groups of people within a country at a given time. The approach is based on evaluated time use, or the flow of emotional experience during daily activities. After reviewing evidence on the validity of subjective well-being measures, we present and evaluate diary-based survey techniques designed to measure individuals' emotional experiences and time use. We illustrate NTA with: (1) a new cross-sectional survey on time use and emotional experience for a representative sample of 4,000 Americans; (2) historical data on the amount of time devoted to various activities in the United States since 1965; and (3) a comparison of time use and well-being in the United States and France. In our applications, we focus mainly on the U-index, a measure of the percentage of time that people spend in an unpleasant state, defined as an instance in which the most intense emotion is a negative one. The U-index helps to overcome some of the limitations of interpersonal comparisons of subjective well-being. National Time Accounting strikes us as a fertile area for future research because of advances in subjective measurement and because time use data are now regularly collected in many countries.
- Creation Date
- 2007-11
- Section URL ID
- CEPS
- Paper Number
- 157
- URL
- https://gceps.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/157krueger.pdf
- File Function
- Jel
- J22
- Keyword(s)
- Suppress
- false
- Series
- 3