The parental home as labour market insurance for young Greeks during the crisis

Labour market conditions in Greece have severely deteriorated during the crisis, affecting youths the most. Using the Greek crisis as a case-study, this paper examines the role of the family as a social safety net for its young members. Specifically, we test the relationship between youth labour outcomes and parental coresidence, whether this relationship has become stronger during the crisis, and the degree to which the relationship is causal. Our results confirm that the parental home is a refuge both for jobless youth and for those in poorly paid, insecure jobs, and this role has intensified during the crisis. We find no reverse causality between co-residence and employment status for young men, and significant reverse causality for women. This finding implies that all youths live in the parental home when they are in need themselves, but it is young women not men who live with parents when parents are in need or for cultural reasons

Who saved Greek youth? Parental support to young adults during the great recession

We use data from the Greek Labour Force Survey to calculate, by region and year, the share of youths who coreside with their parents as a proxy of mutual dependence between parents and adult children, and the share of youths who coreside with their parents and also receive cash transfers as a proxy of one-way dependence of youths on parents. Using panel data analysis, we examine the correlation of each variable with the youth unemployment rate. We find that familial interdependence was strong before the crisis and intensified further during the crisis while at the same time it was transformed from two- to one-directional. Parents stepped in to shelter unemployed and vulnerable youths, mostly young men, and did so by providing housing rather than cash