Intergenerational transmission of home-leaving patterns

Exploiting intergenerationally linked data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, we examine the association between the home-leaving ages of parents and those of their daughters and sons. We propose a framework in which intergenerational associations between nest-leaving patterns of successive generations might stem from three channels of transmission, and we rely on detailed information on three generations of individuals to establish the strength of each channel. We find that a 1-year increase in the age at which a parent left home is associated with children leaving the nest approximately 1 month later. We provide evidence supporting our claim that the bulk of this association is due to direct cultural transmission of home-leaving ages stemming from the inheritance of preferences on the optimal timing of life-course events, such as cohabitation, marriage, and parenthood.