Maternal employment and food produced at home: evidence from Japanese data

This paper examines whether mothers’ labor supply discourages home production, focusing on food preparation at home in Japanese families. Although empirical studies on home production are usually conducted using time use data, we use data collected by scanners, which cover daily goods purchased by over 10,000 households over 3 years. Based on the composition of daily food expenditures for foods consumed, we measure how many products are made using time-consuming processes at home, and examine if time-consuming home production is discouraged by mothers’ employment away from home. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity among households using the panel structure of our scanner data, we first show that mothers’ out-of-home employment has a negative effect on home cooking. This effect is shared across economic classes, particularly when mothers work part-time, as compared with non-working mothers. Second, we show that this negative effect is more apparent in the low economic class. Households in this class show a particular decrease in time-consuming home cooking, especially when the mothers work part-time. Third, the smaller negative effect among the higher class can be explained by stronger health-consciousness and aversion to less-healthy products in this class.