Life-Cycle Consumption of Food at Home in France: Empirical Evidence from Food Expenditures and Home Production

Abstract

The share of the elderly population in France increases steadily, raising concerns that the aging households cannot maintain the pre-retirement level of consumption. We use panel data on food purchases to investigate whether households use the variation in the life-cycle availability of the two inputs of home production time and money, to sustain consumption. Our results indicate that food consumption peaks in early 40 s, drop afterwards in the late 50 s. However, it picks up at the early 60 s dramatically by as much as 40% compared to the late 50 s. This would indicate that food consumption remains uncompromised as households age. Acknowledgement : The ALIMASSENS Collaborative Project is funded by the French National Research Agency (grant # ANR-14-CE20-0003) The AgreenSkills fellowship programme, which has received funding from the EU s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement N FP7-609398