Working papers results

ABSTRACT Compared to older cohorts, young adults in developed societies delay their transition to adulthood. Yet within cohorts, variations in timing and sequencing of events still remain. A major determinant of life course events is social class. This characteristic can influence the sequence of events in terms of socioeconomic inequalities through a different availability of opportunities for social mobility. Several studies show that in North America, a higher familial status tends to decrease the complexity of trajectories, while the opposite effect has been found in Southern Europe. This research examines the sequence of transitions, highlighting in a comparative perspective how life trajectories are influenced by parental social class in the United States and Italy. The main result of the analysis is that the effect of parental background is different across countries. In the United States, we find that a high status favors not only a higher education and an early entry in the labor market, but also a higher heterogeneity of states and the occurrence of new behaviors like single living and cohabitation. In Italy, the effect of social class is gender-specific. Among men, a higher social class tends to delay transitions more than lead towards modern behaviors. Among women, a higher social class either tends to facilitate the experience of a more modern and independent transition, or it generates a higher probability of postponing exit from the parental home, and then family formation, among those who completed their education and found a job.

Long-term developments in economic inequality are attracting growing attention. Earlier works focused on producing reliable measures of inequality, which overall suggest that in Europe, inequality levels were already high in preindustrial times and tended to grow almost continuously from the Middle Ages until the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Proposing a significantly different perspective, this article explores whether the change in inequality is connected to a change in how a condition of unequal distribution of property/income was perceived. By referring to large databases of manuscripts and printed editions covering ca. 1100-1830, we measure the occurrences of keywords connected to the notions of equality/inequality to determine when inequality became a topic considered worthy of specific reflection. Key texts are analyzed in depth to discover how and when such keywords acquired an economic meaning. Lastly, changes in meaning are connected to changes in levels of economic inequality. We demonstrate that the notions of equality/inequality appeared first in scholarly fields far from economic concerns and only slowly acquired economic meanings. This process intensified in the decades preceding the French Revolution of 1789, suggesting that changes in inequality levels contributed to brewing political upheaval in the Age of Revolutions.

The paper gives an update to earlier analysis considering youth poverty and transition to adulthood, which is timely given the economic crisis engulfing many countries in Europe. Whereas, the crisis is affecting young people in particular, there is also huge variation across Europe. We document the short-term consequences of the current recession on the transition to adulthood of young Europeans, focusing on two main cornerstones in the transition to adulthood: economic independence and residential autonomy. We show an almost universal increase in financial hardship experienced by young adults during the recession, which is starting to translate into higher rates of co-residence with parents, hence delaying the process of leaving home and gaining economic independence. The economic recession will have a huge impact on young people and their the transition to adulthood. Economic deprivation and uncertainty will most likely delay the key markers of transition to adulthood.

This paper aims to investigate whether friends’ and peers’ behavior influence and individual’s entry into marriage and parenthood during the transition to adulthood of young, U.S. adults. After first studying entry into marriage and parenthood as two independent events, we then examine them as interrelated processes, thereby considering them as two joint outcomes of an individual’s unique, underlying family-formation strategy. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we engage in a series of discrete time event history models to test whether the larger the number of friends and peers who get married (or have a child), the sooner the individual gets married (or has a child). Results show strong cross-friend effects on entry into parenthood, whereas entry into marriage is only affected by peer effects. Estimates of a multiprocess model show that cross-friend effects on entry into parenthood remain strongly significant even when we control for cross-process unobserved heterogeneity.