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 e¤ect of partnership status on children�s eman- cipation since conventional datasets do not collect this information. To �ll 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 �rst 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 em- ployed for men to emancipate. For women, the marginal e¤ect of having a partner is three times larger than that of working. Expectations measures reveal informa- tion 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 becom- ing unemployed are strong predictors of future emancipation even conditional upon numerous observable characteristics.