We use three waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to analyse the impact of employment, earnings, household income, and welfare on young adults' decision to leave the parental home. In particular we investigate the importance of these income sources in different welfare settings. We use a simultaneous equation approach to control for unobserved heterogeneity and left censoring. We find employment and income to be very important factors in the decisions of young adults to leave home in the Southern European welfare state. For the Continental European welfare states the results are more mixed. Employment and income are still important factors, but the effects are less clear and there are significant variations. In the Social Democratic welfare states, the effect of employment and income appears negligible. The effect is also modest in the UK (the Liberal Market state), a finding we attribute to the educational system.

In this paper we investigate the role economic resources play in the decision of young Italian adults to leave the parental home. This is of particular interest given that, in Italy, young people leave home considerably later than in other European countries. We use the first two waves of the Italian sample of the European Community Household Panel. We use a Heckman selection-type probit procedure to account for left censoring and unobserved heterogeneity. We find that economic circumstances are important. In particular, we find personal income resources, as well as parental income levels, to be crucial in leaving home. Our results suggest that stable employment is an important prerequisite for men to start their own household. For women, on the other hand, finding a partner seems to the most important factor in becoming independent of their parents.

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Age and higher baseline BMI, independent of gender, and other confounding factors, are risk factors for cognitive decline. Reading habit plays a protective role seven years later among northern Italian adults aged 70 years or older. Low physical performance tends, though weakly, to be associated with greater cognitive decline.

Family resources may play an important role in the wellbeing of older people. In this paper, we examine the association between living arrangement and cognitive decline among people over 65 living in different European countries. The underlined hypothesis is that living with others (i.e. spouse or/and children) vis-à-vis living alone may have a positive role in maintaining cognitive functioning, but also that such beneficial influence varies according to the circumstances. To this end, we used data from the first two waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which provides indicators of several cognitive functions: orientation, immediate recall, delayed recall, verbal fluency and numeracy. Net of both the potential biases due to the selective attrition and the re-test effects, the evidence shows that the association between living arrangement and cognitive decline depends on the geographical area and on the starting level of cognitive function.

Human sirtuins are seven proteins with deacetylase activity that are emerging as key modulators of basic physiological functions. Some evidence links SIRT3 to longevity in mammals. This study aimed to investigate whether variants within SIRT3 gene were associated to human longevity. We analyzed 549 genomic DNA collected during the prospective study "Treviso Longeva," including elderly over 70 years of AGE (2014) age from the municipality of Treviso, a small city in the northeast of Italy. We genotyped SIRT3 rs3825075, rs4980329, and rs11555236 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) by real-time polymerase chain reaction allelic discrimination assay. A cross-sectional analysis performed by comparing people over and under 85 years of age did not evidence association among the SIRT3 SNPs and longevity. However, when we performed a longitudinal analysis considering mortality as a dependent variable, we observed an association of SIRT3 rs11555236 and rs4980329 with longevity in the whole population (p values corrected for potential confounders=0.04 and 0.03, respectively). After stratification according to gender, the same SNPs were associated to female longevity only (p values corrected for potential confounders=0.03 and 0.02, respectively). Finally, as rs11555236 was reported to be in linkage disequilibrium with a putative functional enhancer within the SIRT3 gene, we assessed whether rs11555236 genotypes correlated with a different level of SIRT3 protein in peripheral blood mononuclear cells. We found an increased level of SIRT3 in subjects homozygous for the (T) allele. We suggest that SIRT3 genetic variability might be relevant for the modulation of human longevity in the Italian population.

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