Young Brazilians' housing, education and work trajectories between 2003 and 2011: an entropy analysis

Abstract

Academic evidence from all over the world, including Brazil, show that young people have increasingly delayed the decision of leaving their parents' house since the seventies. This paper studies the decision of young people regarding living with their parents, studying and working. Our goal is to evaluate how young people's transition to adulthood changed due to a growing economy between 2003 and 2011. Using the National Household Sample Surveys (PNADs) of 2003 and 2011, we calculate the proportion of people between 15 and 34 years in metropolitan areas living with parents, studying and working. The fraction of young people living with their parents didn't change significantly during 2003 and 2011, there was a drop in school attendance and the proportion of workers among young people increased. In order to access the interplay of these three dimensions we perform an entropy analysis. Our results suggest a reversal of the pattern of extending youth, which has been vastly debated over the last decades.

Keywords:
Entropy analysis; Household composition; Education; Labor market; Transition to adulthood