Adjust for non-ignorable panel attrition in the analysis of leaving the parental home

Abstract

Leaving the parental home is an important life event that has received significant attention in the literature. Research on this topic relies heavily on panel data; however, panel data faces the issue of serious non-ignorable panel attrition associated with leaving the parental home. This paper addresses this issue using the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) as a case study. It introduces an adjustment procedure that combines panel gap imputation via the next observation carried backward and inverse probability weighting based on the retrieved information about leaving the parental home. The results show that this adjustment method yields more precise model estimates for leaving the parental home, and after the adjustment, the positive marginal effects of age and living with non-biological parents, as well as the negative marginal effects of Asian ethnicity and regional house prices, become more pronounced. This adjustment method has the potential to be applied to address non-ignorable panel attrition associated with other events in different panel data.