Living With Your Parents
A striking passage from “Intergenerational Transfers and Inheritance”:
[A] large and growing difference exists between Germany and Italy in rates of coresidence of young adults with their parents. In Italy, 50% of young women and 70% of young men still live in the parental home, while in Germany the corresponding rates are 10% and 30%.
Normally, women are closer to their parents than men – and resent their interference less – so I’d expect the reverse pattern. Is this just a German-Italian thing? Nope. It weakly holds for 15 out of 15 EU countries – men’s rates of coresidence are greater than or equal to women’s every time. I couldn’t find U.S. data, but at this point I’m not expecting to see any American exceptionalism.
Living with my parents had so little appeal for me that I have trouble getting inside the head of any man – or woman – who’d consider it. Can someone help me out? What’s going on here?
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