This paper re-examines whether or not mothers' labor supply discourages home production, focusing on cooking at home in Japanese families. The previous empirical studies using time use data have not always found a negative relationship between mothers' market labor supply and home production. We use alternative data to measure home production: scanner data on daily goods purchased by each household. We measure how much time-consuming home production is conducted, based on the composition of daily food expenditure for cooking.
Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity among households by a panel structure of our scanner data, we first show that there exists a negative effect of mothers' labor supply on home production. Working mothers may purchase more ready-made products in the market, reducing home production time. Second, we show that this negative effect is more apparent in lower social classes. Households in lower social classes purchase more ready-made products in the market, especially when the mothers are working as part-time workers. Thirdly, the smaller negative effect among higher social classes is partly caused by stronger health-consciousness and aversion to less healthy market products among working mothers in high social classes.
