The Effect of Marriage and Employment on Leaving Home in Europe.

The paper examines the leaving home decision of children aged 18-34, considering simultaneously both the employment and the marital status of young people after leaving. Stylized facts and previous studies in fact, have shown that when studying leaving home decision, the probability to form a family and to find a job have also to be analyzed. Moreover, the paper focuses on the association between the economic status of the family of origin and the three decision processes. The sample is drawn from European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we select four countries (i.e. Italy, United Kingdom, Sweden, Poland and France) to enable cross-country comparison. The time span, 2004-2011, gives us the possibility to look at individuals before and after the economic crisis. We estimate a trivariate probit model for the probability of leaving home, being employed and being married allowing the error terms to be correlated. Preliminary results show that employment and marital status, above all in Italy, are key factors to escape from parental home. As expected, after 2008 individuals are less likely to leave parental home, to be employed and to marry.