Eighty five percent of Italian men aged 18-33 live with their parents. In this paper we use micro data from the Bank of Italy Survey of Households' Income and Wealth from 1989 to 1998 to explain this remarkably high rate of cohabitation. We argue that Italian parents like to live with their children and a rise in their income makes it possible for them to offer their children higher consumption in exchange for their presence at home. Children prefer to live on their own but are willing to exchange some independence for extra consumption. We test the predictions of the model by estimating the effect of parental income on the probability that children live with their parents. The key econometric issue is the endogeneity of parental income. In order to identify the causal effect of parental income on children’s living arrangements we use changes in parents’ retirement age induced by the 1992 reform of the Italian social security as an instrument for parental income. By raising retirement age, this reform forced some fathers to remain in the labor market longer than the cohort immediately preceding them, therefore raising their income. Our instrumental variable estimates indicate that a rise in parents' income significantly raises the children’s propensity to live at home: a $500 increase in annual parental income results in a 3 to 3.5 percentage point rise in the proportion of children living with their parents.

We estimate the impact of a large anti-poverty program – the Uruguayan PANES – on political support for the government that implemented it. The program mainly consisted of a monthly cash transfer for a period of roughly two and half years. Using the discontinuity in program assignment based on a pre-treatment score, we find that beneficiary households are 21 to 28 percentage points more likely to favor the current government (relative to the previous government). Impacts on political support are larger among poorer households and for those near the center of the political spectrum, consistent with the probabilistic voting model in political economy. Effects persist after the cash transfer program ends. We estimate that the annual cost of increasing government political support by 1 percentage point is roughly 0.9% of annual government social expenditures.