Youth labor market entry and home leaving: an application of bivariate duration models.

Summary The purpose of this thesis is to study the professional and family trajectories of young people, by examining their interactions. Do unemployment and precarious employment situations threaten access to the maturity that constitutes residential autonomy? Conversely, does a prolonged stay in the parental home improve the process of professional integration or, on the contrary, discourage the effort to look for a job? The trajectories in question are processes that do not necessarily have the same significance depending on whether they take time or not. We examine the impact of work and family trajectories on each other by studying the length of time it takes to find a first job and the length of time spent living with parents. For the empirical work, we use the Céreq "Mesures jeunes" panel, which allows us to observe the professional and family situation of 2,423 young people with little or no formal education, with a technical background, from the time they left the school system in June 1989 until December 1993. The interactions are studied in the framework of bivariate duration models. The specification of a bivariate exponential distribution makes it possible to test these interactions between access to employment and departure from the parental home by means of a dependency term. Our analysis confirms the existence of a link between the duration of access to employment and access to residential autonomy. It is therefore possible to analyze the current extension of young people's cohabitation with their parents as the result of their difficulties on the labor market. Conversely, the prolonged cohabitation of young people delays their access to a permanent job. However, another important result of our research contributes to seriously relativizing the role of interactions: the effects of differences in gender, level of education and specialization are clearly more important than the mutual influence of trajectories.