Department Chair and Professor Marla Ripoll was interviewed for Wall Street Journal article titled "Well Into Adulthood and Still Getting Money From Their Parents." The January 25, 2024 article discusses findings from a paper by Ripoll and PhD alumnus Siqiang Yang, "Financial Transfers from Parents to Adult Children." From the article:
Parents have always supported their children into adulthood, from funding weddings to buying a home. Now the financial umbilical cord extends much later into adulthood.
. . .
Adult children aren't necessarily getting larger checks from their parents, but they are staying on the parental payroll for longer than previous generations, according to Marla Ripoll, professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh who studied the trend by analyzing payments from parents to adult children over a 20-year span.
Ripoll found that 14% of adult children receive a transfer of money from their parents at least once in any given year, and roughly half get financial help at some point within that period. Those rates have been stable for years. What has changed is that the transfers now continue for much longer, she found. This longer-term help might be a drag on social mobility, as it becomes even harder for young people from lower-income families to catch up, researchers said.