The Glaser Progress Foundation awarded a grant to Yale University to establish the Program on Non-Market Accounts (Yale-PNA). Yale-PNA conducted research to support the development of a prototype set of non-market satellite accounts for the United States. Professor William Nordhaus of the Yale Department of Economics is the Director of the program. The research undertaken by this program reviewed existing studies, and compiled harmonized data sets to facilitate constructing prototype accounts. This site reports on the work completed to date and provides access to the results.

Accomplishments
 
While the project supported work at Yale, it also supported research of scholars at other universities and research institutions. Completed activities include:

• The report of a National Academy of Sciences panel on Non-Market Accounts issued in December 2005.

• Studies to foster the development of environmental accounts. This work is under the direction of Robert Mendelsohn. 

• A review of time use survey data conducted by a team of time use survey researchers led by Prof. Andrew Harvey of Canada. [This report will be available on this website later in the year when it is released.]

• The construction of a harmonized dataset (American Heritage Time Use Studies-AHTUS) including surveys conducted from 1965-66 through 2003. Jonathan Gershuny, Kimberly Fisher and Muriel Egerton oversaw this work at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.

Next Steps
 

The products from these time use projects are currently under review by Yale PNA which will shortly announce the formation of a  review panel.  At the conclusion of the review later this year, we will release a report covering the assessment of the datasets and the procedures used for the harmonization.

It is expected that the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) will continue to maintain the AHTUS. CTUR will move from ISER to the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford in October 2006.

Data users can download the latest copy of data files from the CTUR website.
http://www.timeuse.org/ahtus/

CTUR reports that some complications in the initial test version of data they released on CD in July 2005 have been identified and corrected. One of these errors which resulted from the corruption of the original episode data from the 1985 survey could effect research results. These errors are corrected on Release 1 available on the CTUR website. Any remaining copies of the CD should be destroyed. Users who have any suggestions or comments relating to the harmonization are invited to contact us william.nordhaus@yale.edu and the AHTUS team at CTUR. ahtus.team@timeuse.org

By the end of the year, the Yale-PNA expects to issue a CD Rom with the reports, codebooks and harmonized dataset. This material will also appear on this website as it is reviewed, revised and completed. The CD will contain the datasets as of the date of its publication. More updated copies will continue to be available from the CTUR website as noted above.

Users who would like to be notified of the availability of this material or who would like to receive the CD Rom are asked to send us an  email.

We also invite scholars who use the preliminary data to send comments which will be shared with the review panel. 

Contacts

Users can contact the following people for more information.
Prof. William Nordhaus, Yale University Department of Economics
Prof. Katharine Abraham, University of Maryland was the chair of the CNSTAT panel
Prof. Robert Mendlesohn, Yale University, who was principally responsible for the environmental accounting part of the Yale PNA
Prof. Jonathan Gershuny, ISER Essex University who lead the team that worked on the harmonization of the data.
Prof. Andrew Harvey, St. Mary's College, Halifax, Canada who lead the assessment team
and
Dr. Dan Melnick, Dan Melnick Research, Bethesda Maryland, Director, Time Use Studies.