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Migration is often viewed as a way to enhance occupational careers. However, particularly in Mediterranean countries, labour market outcomes may also depend on local family resources. We investigate how men's and women's labour market outcomes differ between (1) those who migrated and those who did not; and (2) those who live close to family and those who live farther away. Our main contributions are the investigation of the association between migration and labour market outcomes in a different context than the more commonly studied Northern and Western European countries and the United States, and of the role of living close to family in labour market outcomes. We used a sample of labour market participants from the "Attitudes and Expectations About Mobility" survey, conducted in Spain in 2019. Our results show that the likelihood of being a professional is greater for women who migrated than for those who did not, and that the likelihood of being unemployed or in a temporary job is lower for women who live close to family than for those who do not, but neither association was found for men. The finding for living close to family is in line with the notion that nearby family may protect women in particular from precarious labour market positions. The finding for migration differs from previous findings for Northern and Western Europe and the United States, which indicate that migration is beneficial to men in particular. This difference might be specific to a low-migration context, but data limitations prevent firm conclusions.

Moving in with a partner is a step in the process of institutionalising a romantic relationship, that is, establishing the relationship in such a way that it is more embedded in the social environment and more strongly regulated by social norms and mutual expectations. But under what circumstances do couples decide to establish a joint household? We study the transition to a coresidential partnership among couples in a ‘living-apart-together’ (LAT) relationship. We use data from the seven waves of the German Family Panel (pairfam) dataset (N = 2428 LAT relationships of men and women born in 1971–1973, 1981–1983, and 1991–1993). In order to analyse especially the partnership processes of younger adults, we focus on respondents in the age range of 18 to 42 in the time period between 2008 to 2016. Using discrete-time event-history models, we test hypotheses about the partners’ resources, relationship quality, degree of relationship institutionalisation, and exposure to different kinds of costs. Our results indicate that especially equality and institutionalisation factors, as well as the costs of moving and of starting to coreside, are associated with the decision to move in together. Resources are important for those LAT partners who are living in the parental household, while for LAT partners who have already left the parental home no effect of resources was found on the transition to a coresidential union.

The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course in societies around the world. In this essay, we draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic’s effects on individuals, families, and populations. We explore the pandemic’s implications for the organization and experience of life transitions and trajectories within and across central domains: health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. We consider both the life course implications of being infected by the Covid-19 virus or attached to someone who has; and being affected by the pandemic’s social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences. It is our goal to offer some programmatic observations on which life course research and policies can build as the pandemic’s short- and long-term consequences unfold