Dynamics of Residential Arrangements of Older Women in Mexico

Beth Soldo, University of Pennsylvania
Rania Tfaily, University of Pennsylvania

Previous studies in developed countries regularly report that higher levels of personal income increase the likelihood of residential independence for the elderly while poor health reduces the odds. In this paper, we extend this literature to Mexico, a country where public transfer programs are lean in coverage and generosity of benefits. Many older women, and especially widows, have few residential options other than to live with the families of an adult child. In this paper we use multi-level models to analyze residential arrangements of unmarried mothers aged 50 and over. Data are from the first two waves of the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS). The outcome of interest is whether each child lives with or nearby his/her mother, recognizing three levels: time, shared family traits, including time-specific attributes of the mother, and individual child traits, including past residential and migration history.