Mi casa es tu casa: Investigating Cohabitation and Inflation in Argentina

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Employment, Economic Context, and Family

Abstract

Family scholars have studied the increase of cohabitation for decades. Existing work suggests that growing acceptance of cohabitation as a precursor to marriage, greater gender egalitarianism, macroeconomic instability, and labor market restructuring all play a part. However, economic shocks remain understudied in sociological literature. In this paper, I specifically address the role that varying inflation rates have on cohabitation rates with the hypothesis that higher inflation correlates with increased cohabitation. Using Argentina’s quarterly Permanent Household Survey and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America’s inflation data, I leverage the wide variation of inflation over a 16-year period (2003–2019) alongside household characteristics and family formation. Utilizing a four-quarter inflation lag and logistic regression, I find that cohabitation has a negative, non-significant relationship with inflation. Logistic regression results show that women are more likely to cohabit than men and that education is negatively correlated with cohabitation. Interacting gender and education suggests that this negative relationship is weaker for more-educated women than men. These findings highlight the disproportionate effect inflation has on family formation for Argentinians across gender and education.

Author

• Brendan Frizzell, University of Southern California