A Proposal of Measure of Leaving Home Date and an International Comparison

Byron Villacis, University of California, Berkeley

The leaving home demographic event or emancipation is the date when a person leaves his or her parents house to create a new home or to join another one. This paper proposes a metric to measure the age of emancipated and non-emancipated population, using -for first time- population microdata from census. Applying the metric for 24 countries, the proposed metric is calculated and evaluated with economic and social variables such as competitiveness, fertility and population density. The results show a positive association between older ages of emancipated population and lower levels of fertility. Oppositely, there is no association between the emancipation and population density and with competitiveness. The metric is stable and presents consistent results, an optimistic input for further analysis and refinement of the proposal for quantitative evaluations.