Three essays on Japanese household food consumption

This dissertation consists of three essays on food consumption patterns of Japanese household using individual household level data. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate how the Japanese household food consumption patterns have changed, and how the changes are related to the social demographic status (the individual household's characteristics) and the economic status of individual households.; First essay focuses on the overall tendencies of food-at-home consumption patterns. Although many studies have focused on the demand for a specific good such as beef and vegetables in Japan, there are relatively few studies that focused on the overall tendencies of household food consumption. A complete demand system of eleven major aggregated food categories with 24 demographic variables is estimated. Westernization and externalization , two major trends observed in time series data, are also confirmed in the cross sectional data. The estimation results show (1) the food consumption patterns of younger households are more westernized than those of older households, and (2) food consumption patterns of the Japanese households are more externalized when the households face the higher cooking cost.; Second essay focuses on the demand for food away from home and prepared foods. Increases in the food prepared outside the household have been observed in most developed countries and Japan is not an exception. Demand for food away from home and prepared foods are estimated with emphasizes on the frequency of purchases and the per unit expenditure. The main results are (1) the frequency and the expenditure of food away from home are correlated, which supports the validity of the polychotomous sample selection model, and (2) demand for food away from home and prepared foods have quite different characteristics; food away from home is a luxury good and prepared foods are necessity used as substitute/complements for at home food consumption.; Third essay specifically focuses on the demand for non-glutinous rice. Rice demand is estimated specifically considering the zero consumption problem. The infrequency of purchase model, the alternative approach to Tobit model is proposed and is verified that the approach is more suitable. The main estimation results are, (1) contrary to the past literature using long time-series data, rice is a normal (necessity) good, and the own price elasticity is smaller than those estimated in previous studies, and (2) rice is consumed more by older households, households with working wives and households with smaller household size.