Residential Choices of Young Americans

37 Pages Posted: 19 Sep 2016

See all articles by Eleonora Patacchini

Eleonora Patacchini

Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) ; IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Tiziano Arduini

University of Bologna-Department of Economics

Abstract

Using detailed data on a cohort of young Americans who were in their late twenties and early thirties in 2008, we investigate the importance of forces different from economic incentives in nest-leaving decisions. We apply recent methods from social network econometrics to identify the importance of peers net of confounding factors. For the entire sample, our findings reveal no evidence of peer effects. Indicators of parenting and the social structure of families appear to be the major factors in the decisions to coreside with parents. However, for those who moved back home after a few years of living alone, we find strong peer effects. These findings are consistent with theories of social influences in peer groups in which peers play a critical role for individuals with time-inconsistent preferences.

Keywords: living arrangements, social networks, endogenous network formation, spatial autoregressive model, control function approach, Bayesian estimation, social multiplier

JEL Classification: A14, C21, D85, R21, Z13

Suggested Citation

Patacchini, Eleonora and Arduini, Tiziano, Residential Choices of Young Americans. IZA Discussion Paper No. 10186, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2840130 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2840130

Eleonora Patacchini (Contact Author)

Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) ( email )

Via Due Macelli, 73
Rome, 00187
Italy

IZA Institute of Labor Economics ( email )

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Tiziano Arduini

University of Bologna-Department of Economics ( email )

Piazzale Scaravilli 2
Bologna, 40126
Italy

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/site/tizianoarduini/

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