Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/71501 
Year of Publication: 
2005
Series/Report no.: 
IFS Working Papers No. 05/03
Publisher: 
Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London
Abstract: 
We show that as household size increases, households substitute away from prepared foods and towards ingredients. They also devote more time to food preparation. These observations (1) are consistent with a simple model with home production, returns to scale in the time input to food preparation, and varieties of food that differ in the required time input; (2) support the idea that returns to scale in home production are an important source of returns to scale in consumption; and (3), mean that across household sizes, household market expenditures on food are not proportional to food consumption quantities. The latter may provide a partial explanation for a puzzle raised by Deaton and Paxson.
Subjects: 
Household returns to scale
home production
food preparation
JEL: 
D11
D12
D13
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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