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.

No abstract

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.