The Role of Partnership Status and Expectations on the Emancipation Behaviour of Spanish Graduates

Leaving the nest in Southern Europe, and to a lesser extend in other countries, is a decision taken simultaneously by two young adults who form a new household. However, nothing is known about the effect of partnership status on children’s emancipation since conventional datasets do not collect this information. To fill this gap we have collected a unique dataset of 1.600 individuals that is representative of the population of graduates at the University of Murcia aged 25 to 29 years at the time of the first interview in 2004. Non-emancipated respondents were reinterviewed 12 and 24 months following the initial interview and we elicited their subjective beliefs about the one-year-ahead probability of several personal and job-related outcomes. Our empirical results indicate that having a partner is as relevant as being employed for men to emancipate. For women, the marginal effect of having a partner is three times larger than that of working. Expectations measures reveal information about the realization of the reference outcome not otherwise available from objective variables. Moreover, partnered respondents’ expectations about living with their partner and about their employed partners losing their job or becoming unemployed are strong predictors of future emancipation even conditional upon numerous observable characteristics.