Modelling the consumption of home-produced vegetables with an application to French households

The purpose of this paper is to study the trade-off between purchases and home production of food. We develop a simple household production model which predicts a zero elasticity of home production with respect to total expenditure. Focusing on vegetables, we use data from the 1991 French National Food Survey. Due to data limitations, a reduced form of the structural household production model is estimated. We use Working Leser functional forms for the share of vegetables in total food consumption and the share of home production in vegetable consumption, conditional on the decision to maintain a kitchen garden. As predicted by the theoretical model, we estimate a zero elasticity of home production with respect to total vegetable outlay