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Young people leave the parental home at different ages, and differences exist both between and within societies. To explain this heterogeneity, differences in earnings and employment, education and family formation are popular candidates. Comparative research has emphasised the importance of institutional arrangements, in particular the way state welfare systems are able to support young individuals in the transition to adulthood. It has been argued, however, that despite differences in welfare support, differences in social norms also play an important role. In this paper we make an attempt to explain the heterogeneity in individuals' perceptions of the age deadline for leaving home. Using information from the third round of the European Social Survey (ESS) we implement a series of multi-level regression models where we account both for country and regional heterogeneity. The idea is that contextual variables may affect individuals' perception of the age deadline, which in turn is likely to matter for the actual age of leaving home. Just as in the literature concerned with explaining actual behaviour, we find that strong normative differences between countries persist. We also find significant, though lower, regional variability in the analysis on the pooled set of European countries we have in our data set. Unemployment rate and education are found to have a strong role in explaining heterogeneity of norms at the country level, while religiosity influences age norms mostly at the regional level. This is consistent with the idea that cultural factors are important at the regional level while structural factors show their influence at the country level.

Using age specific fertility rates of Italian and Swedish women aged between 15 and 49 years old I examine the presence of fertility postponement in period and cohort outputs. Period data consist of standard five-year age group rates ranging from 1960 to 2005. Cohort data are arranged on age specific year groups born between years 1930-1970. The method used in this work is based upon quadratic spline interpolation procedure, developed by Carl P. Schmertmann (2003), in which three index ages determine the schedules shape. The recent fertility postponing behavior is investigated through the help of five index ages, which show the dynamics of postponement both in cohort and period data.

We study a setting where anti-discrimination legislation gives rise to adverse selection in the labor market. Firms rely on nonlinear compensation contracts to screen workers who differ in their family/career orientation. This results in a la- bor market equilibrium where career-oriented workers are offered an inefficiently low duration of parental leave. In addition, family-oriented workers are offered lower wages as compared to their equally skilled career-oriented counterparts. We demonstrate the usefulness of mandatory parental leave rules in mitigating the distortion in the labor market and derive conditions under which a Pareto im- provement is possible. We also characterize the optimal parental leave policy and highlight the possibility for parental leave legislation to eliminate the wage penalty of family-oriented workers by supporting pooling employment contracts.

The aim of this paper is to assess the quality of the ranking of institutions obtained with multilevel techniques in presence of different model misspecifications and data structures. Through a Monte Carlo simulation study, we find that it is quite hard to obtain a reliable ranking of the whole effectiveness distribution while, under various experimental conditions, it is possible to identify institutions with extreme performances. Ranking quality increases with increasing intra class correlation coefficient and/or overall sample size. Furthermore, multilevel models where the between and within cluster components of first-level covariates are distinguished perform significantly better than both multilevel models where the two effects are set to be equal and the fixed effect models.

ABSTRACT It is well established that the departure from the parental home of young Italian adults occurs at a particularly late age, especially when compared to northern European countries. Moreover, in Italy a large gap exists between young people’s aspirations and their subsequent realization. This study aims to explore the factors favouring or hampering the successful achievement of residential independence from the family of origin. Using data from the longitudinal surveys “Family and Social Subjects”, carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) in 2003 and 2007, we analyze leaving home as a mid-term decision-making process. Our results provide empirical evidence that the inability to find a stable job reduces young adults’ autonomy. Net of employment status, attitudes and social norms also have an important effect on the intention to leave the family home. The socio-cultural status of the family of origin specifically favours the successful realization of the behaviour. Notably, this effect is gender-specific, with women more influenced by the mother and men by the father.

We empirically assess the effect of historical slavery on the African American family structure. Our hypothesis is that female single headship among blacks is more likely to emerge in association not with slavery per se, but with slavery in sugar plantations, since the extreme demographic and social conditions prevailing in the latter have persistently affected family formation patterns. By exploiting the exogenous variation in sugar suitability, we establish the following. In 1850, sugar suitability is indeed associated with extreme demographic outcomes within the slave population. Over the period 1880-1940, higher sugar suitability determines a higher likelihood of single female headship. The effect is driven by blacks and starts fading in 1920 in connection with the Great Migration. OLS estimates are complemented with a matching estimator and a fuzzy RDD. Over a linked sample between 1880 and 1930, we identify an even stronger intergenerational legacy of sugar planting for migrants. By 1990, the effect of sugar is replaced by that of slavery and the black share, consistent with the spread of its influence through migration and intermarriage, and black incarceration emerges as a powerful mediator. By matching slaves’ ethnic origins with ethnographic data we rule out any influence of African cultural traditions.

There is a growing concern that the widespread use of computers, mobile phones and other digital devices before bedtime disrupts our sleep with detrimental effects on our health and cognitive performance. High-speed Internet promotes the use of electronic devices, video games and Internet addiction (e.g., online games and cyberloafing). Exposure to artificial light from tablets and PCs can alterate individuals’ sleep patterns. However, there is little empirical evidence on the causal relationship between technology use near bedtime and sleep. This paper studies the causal effects of access to high-speed Internet on sleep. We first show that playing video games, using PC or smartphones, watching TV or movies are correlated with shorter sleep duration. Second, we exploit historical differences in pre-existing telephone infrastructure that affected the deployment of high-speed Internet across Germany (see Falck et al., 2014) to identify a source of plausibly exogenous variation in access to Broadband. Using this instrumental variable strategy, we find that DSL access reduces sleep duration and sleep satisfaction.