Abstract
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.
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Notes
Optimal solutions under a standard model state that marginal product of preparation time equals the ratio of marginal utility of leisure to marginal utility of preparation time, and the ratio of a marginal product of preparation time to that of purchased food equals the ratio of a price of time (wage) to a price of purchased foods.
Instant noodles are usually packed in a plastic/paper container, put in hot water, and ready to be eaten within three minutes. Since we do not need cook in utensils, we can save much time for home cooking. Cooked rice is usually packed in a plastic case and is warmed up for one minute in a micro-wave. Cooking time is much shorter than the case of steaming up rice by a rice cooker or a pan, which takes at least 30 min to be ready.
As possible instruments, we used ratios of female unemployment or job offers in each residential area (prefecture or larger area groups), husband’s occupation and industry, social class in the previous year, residential area dummies, and various combinations of these variables. None of these satisfy over-identification restrictions or overcome the problem of weak instruments.
Although we split economic classes based on expenditure/consumption, we confirmed that our results would be unchanged even if we split the classes based on income.
Table 2 reports the results only for the share of instant noodles, but we also conducted the same sample separation for shares of cooked rice and flour, and found the same implication such that the discouraging effect of maternal labor outside the home on home cooking is clearer in lower economic groups.
Note, however, that our data do not contain the information on working hours. Part-time workers in our sample may face a strict time constraint: they may have several short working- hour jobs, and/or they may have jobs during a time necessary for food-preparations. Further investigation is required to clarify the relationship between working hours and home production time.
No big differential between restricted and unrestricted households may suggest that a previous concern that time-pressed working mothers are less likely to answer a survey should not matter in our empirical investigation.
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Acknowledgments
We appreciate Intage Inc. for allowing us to use their scanner data. We also appreciate Naohito Abe, Shoshana Grossbard, Ben Heijdra, Ayako Kondo, Andrew Leicester, Daiji Kawaguchi, Kohei Kawaguchi, Naoki Mitani, Chiaki Moriguchi, Masaki Nakabayashi, Hiroko Okudaira, Linda Toolsema-Veldman, Chikako Yamauchi and the seminar participants at Hitotsubashi University, Osaka University, Okayama University and University of Groningen for their helpful comments. The first author receives Grant-in-Aid for scientific research by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of the Japanese Government, and Grant-in-Aid for Osaka University Global Centers of Excellence Program by MEXT.
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Kohara, M., Kamiya, Y. Maternal employment and food produced at home: evidence from Japanese data. Rev Econ Household 14, 417–442 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-015-9295-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-015-9295-8