Multigenerational households provide insurance against labour market risk by lowering housing costs
during periods of income loss. I show that transitions into unemployment significantly increase the
likelihood of moving home, and that this relationship persists into middle age after controlling for parental
health and caregiving needs. Motivated by this evidence, I estimate a structural life-cycle model in
which individuals insure against unemployment risk through savings or co-residence in a directed search
environment. Access to co-residence allows workers to search for higher-wage jobs in exchange for longer
expected unemployment durations; removing this option reduces search duration by 8 weeks but lowers
match quality and consumption. The welfare value of this insurance is persistent up to age 40 because
older workers are less able to recover from unemployment spells, and is equivalent to a 71% increase in
unemployment insurance benefits for an ex ante consumer.
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Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (1998–2018), I show that parent and child incomes,
together with additional observables, explain at most 20 percent of the variation in inter vivos financial
transfers. This finding is inconsistent with standard models of homogeneous altruism, in which transfer
variation is driven entirely by differences in parent and child incomes. I develop a static model of het-
erogeneous parental altruism in which altruism follows a log-normal distribution. The model generates
transfers across the child income distribution, including positive transfers to relatively high-income chil-
dren, a feature absent from standard homogeneous-altruism models. These distributional implications
are important for policy evaluation, as standard models may overstate familial support for low-income
children while understating support for high-income children.
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From 2000 to 2020, rental costs increased 20 percent faster than average prices. Over the same period, co-residence between parents and their adult children rose by almost 40 percent among individuals from ages 20 through 40. This paper analyzes the effects of rising rents on labor market search behaviour in a model of optional parental co- residence. I show that rent increases consistent with the data account for most of the observed rise in co-residence. Higher rental costs lead consumers to search more selectively, targeting higher-wage jobs despite lower job-finding probabilities, which results in higher unemployment. In addition, the ex ante value of the option to move home increases by 13 percent relative to an environment without rising rents.