Labor supply and household meal production: new results from the Health and Retirement Survey

In this paper, I consider how individuals allocate time and monetary resources to meal production when they change the number of hours they spend at work. Using the CAMS supplement to the HRS, I find that individuals who increased the number of hours worked had higher expenditures on groceries and allocate less time to meal preparation at home. Similarly, they have higher expenditures on meals outside the home, while allocating less time to eating out. These results concord well with previous work looking at the effect of retirement on meal production and are consistent with standard models of household production. Up to two-thirds of the changes in meal production seen at retirement can be attributed to the pure intensive effect of working less. That still leaves at one-third to be explained by fixed-costs of employment and the work environment. JEL Classifications: D12, D13, J22 * This is a preliminary version. Do not cite or quote without author's permission. Special thanks to John Mullahy, Bobbi Wolfe, Karl Scholz and Nathan Tefft. This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award No. T32 MH18029-21 from the National Institute of Mental Health.  Contact: Richard A. Dunn, University of Wisconsin-Department of Economics, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53703. tel: 01 608 263 2873. email: radunn_at_wisc.edu. web: www.ssc.wisc.edu/~rdunn