Employed or inactive? Cross-national differences in coding parental leave beneficiaries in Labour Force Survey data

Malgorzata Mikucka and Marie Valentova

No 2011-45, LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

Abstract: In survey research the parental leave beneficiaries are usually coded as either employed or inactive. One of the exceptions is the European Labor Force Survey (EU-LFS), which (from 2006) includes parental leave among other forms of being employed but temporarily not working. This paper explores classification of parental leave takers in EU-LFS, focusing on cross-country discrepancies and their consequences. Our results show that classification rules differ cross-nationally: in some countries parental leave takers are considered inactive, in others – employed but temporarily not working. In particular in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Slovakia the EU-LFS data do not reflect the actual use of parental leaves because beneficiaries are coded as inactive. We estimate the actual number of mothers on parental leave in these countries and show that EU-LFS employment rates of women aged 18-40 are biased downwards 2-7 percentage points; for mothers of children aged 0-2 the bias reaches 12-45 percentage points . Our study shows the limited comparability of EU-LFS employment rates, warns about possible bias in cross-national studies and shows the importance of transparent and consistent survey measurement of employment status.

Keywords: parental leave; labor market status; employment status; cross-country comparability; Labour Force Survey; Czech Republic; Estonia; Hungary; Slovakia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J28 J48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2011-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.liser.lu/publi_viewer.cfm?tmp=2751 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:irs:cepswp:2011-45

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) 11, Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, G.-D. Luxembourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Library and Documentation ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).