In 2023 all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants were allowed to start grocery shopping online. This paper provides the first answer to the question: What is online shopping worth to the SNAP participant in dollars? Using meal-kit pricing and time-use data, an implicit wage rate and dollar value distribution are estimated for time saved in home food production from online grocery shopping. We report the 95th, 75th, 50th, 25th, and 5th percentile results. We simulate saving 50%, 75%, and 90% of grocery shopping time and estimate the savings per hour per meal. For example, if online shopping saved 75% of shopping time, the median saving per hour per meal would be $2.59. If a family of four made 15 to 30 meals a month, this corresponds to an implicit 5% to 11% increase in the benefits per month due to the time saved. The implicit wage rate provides simple and elegant economic insights into many aspects of food production and consumption not obtainable by just considering the money price.

In applied sciences large-scale surveys are a popular means to acquire insights in the choices that people make in different contexts. In transportation research, for example, tens of thousands stated their choices between alternatives characterized by cost and time attributes. In this study I explore the extent to which the data acquired in such studies may exhibit the co-occurrence of different choice algorithms within such survey populations. For that purpose I propose a novel version of the outcome-oriented approach. It is applied to the outcomes of two Dutch value-of-time surveys. If the recorded choice patterns are viewed apart, most could be the result of several different algorithms, in line with the main criticism of the outcome-oriented approach. The novel version considers the causal relationships between an individual’s personal circumstances, his use of a particular algorithm and the resulting choice pattern. It employs inferential statistics for analyses of the frequencies of the expected and actually recorded choice patterns within groups of respondents. Applied to the Dutch survey results this allowed disentangling, at the aggregate level, the overlap in explaining compensatory and non-compensatory algorithms to a large extent. It revealed that weighted additive (WADD) algorithms incorporating different degrees of loss aversion could explain most recorded choice behaviour while none of the many non-compensatory algorithms that were considered yielded a more than marginal explanation. Replications of this study, preferably by re-analysing other large-scale surveys with more complicated choice sets, is recommended to find out whether or not these findings are incidental.

Valuing changes in time use is often a critical element of economic analyses of development projects. In this paper we review the literature on the monetary value of time in low- and middle-income countries and find support for a commonly used benchmark of 50% of after-tax wages for time changes in activities in the informal sector, such as collecting water or traveling to health clinics. We offer recommendations to analysts who are conducting benefit-cost analyses in these settings about what methods they can use to estimate the value of time. These include a benefits transfer approach and also a relatively simple stated preference approach that might be deployed in a specific context if the project recommendation is sensitive to the assumption of the value of time or if the distribution of the benefits of time savings is especially important.

The paper tests two alternative specifications for the opportunity cost of time in travel cost models. The standard travel cost survey design is enriched to include a contingent valuation type question about peoples' willingness to accept compensation to forgo a precisely defined recreational experience. It is hypothesized that individually revealed value of time more appropriately reflects the opportunity costs of time associated with a particular aspect of recreation than the wage rate which measures the trade-off between work and leisure generally. The results seem to indicate a better overall fit for the models with the elicited value of individual consumer's time than for the models with the more traditional hourly earnings (wage rates). The importance of the correct measurement of the opportunity cost time is illustrated by showing that estimated consumer surpluses based on two different value of time measurements differ significantly.

It was a different era when Gary Becker did his groundbreaking work on the economics of fertility, during the years from the late 1950 through the early 1990s. There was great concern then about the “population explosion” due to sustained high fertility in the developing world after mortality declined following World War II. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb” predicting disaster and mass starvation due to rapid population growth: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death. . . .” Robert McNamara, then the President of the World Bank, in 1984 said “Short of thermonuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces over the decades immediately ahead. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.”