Mammismo

Italian mammas making offers their sons can't refuse Eight out of ten Italian men aged 18 to 30 live with their parents. Photograph: Getty And you thought good Italian boys stay at home because they love mamma? Not according to two economists who today announced to a baffled world that it's really to do with the "endogeneity of parental income" or, more crudely, parental bribery. Whether or not it's more to do with money and power than a supply of good pasta, the economic effects of "mammismo" in Italy are striking. Eight out of 10 Italian men aged 18 to 30 live with their parents compared to one in five in the UK and one in four in the US, note Marco Manacorda, of Queen Mary, University of London, and Enrico Moretti, of the University of California, Berkeley. Their article, published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, questions whether Italian parents are really as altruistic as they like to think and are bribing their children to stay at home. The high - and apparently increasing - propensity of young Italians, women as well as men, to live with their parents is associated with extremely high youth unemployment; low and declining fertility; and low and declining migration rates. Parents let their children live at home if they are unemployed until they can get on their feet and become independent, supplying the support that the state does not. But Drs Manacorda and Moretti challenge this view. "We argue that one important and neglected factor explaining these remarkably high rates of co-residence is that Italian parents like having their children around and are willing to 'bribe' them into cohabitation in exchange for some monetary transfers. "Italian parents benefit from the companionship and other services their children provide, and most importantly, from the opportunity they have to get their children to 'conform' to their precepts when they live together. "Paradoxically, it is cohabitation that produces higher youth unemployment rather than the other way round: children tend to have lower incentives to find their own way in the labour market. The price young Italians pay in exchange for higher consumption today is lower independence and possibly lower lifetime satisfaction." "The key econometric issue is the endogeneity of parental income," say the two economists. To test their idea they looked at the effect of the 1992 reform of the Italian social security which raised the retirement age, forcing some fathers to work longer but therefore raising their income. "We find that this temporary increase in parental income was associated with a rise in co-residence rates. A 10% increase in parents' income resulted in an increase of approximately 10% in the proportion of adult children living at home." This contrasts with the US where cohabitation rates tend to fall as parental income rises. They continue: "Although this result does not necessarily rule out alternative explanations, it is consistent with our 'bribery' story. When parents have more money, they buy more of their children's co-residence. If parents would rather live on their own, they would probably help their children to gain their independence as they become better off. "In sum, we think that Italian parents put quite a lot of effort into being loved by their children. And to some extent, they buy this love in exchange for their children's giving away some of their independence. Although this might at first sight appear like a mere curiosity, we argue that it has profound economic and social implications."