Luxembourg - On February 26^th, LISER researchers were invited to Luxembourg’s parliament to present the report “Évaluation intermédiaire des résultats de la réforme du congé parental de 2016”  in the Commission of Family Affairs and Integration in the presence of Corinne Cahen, Minister for Family Affairs and Integration. The interim assessment presented the results of the new parental leave system as established by the law of 3 November 2016 reforming parental leave.

Based on a motion from the Parliament, which invited for an evaluation of the effects of parental leave on the job market, the effects on equal opportunities and the effects in the interest of the child, the government enacted the evaluation. In doing so, an interim assessment of the new parental leave system to evaluate the different models offered to parents was put into place.

The evaluation was financed by the Ministry of Family Affairs, Integration and the Greater Region and used mainly anonymised administrative data from the General Inspectorate of Social Security (IGSS).

The analyses focused on several key areas. From the employee perspective, three types of analysis were made:

• a descriptive analysis of trends in parental leave take-up rate in the 12 months following birth in general, and according to some characteristics relating to the parental leave (rank and form), to the parents (country of residence, family composition, income, etc.), and to their employers (business activity and size of firms),
• the comparison of the parental leave take-up behaviour of parents (and their different subgroups) before and after the reform of 2016,
• and a descriptive analysis of mothers’ behaviour on the labour market after parental leave.

These core analyses of the evaluation were complemented by a qualitative analysis of the perception of the parental leave reform by a specifically targeted group of employers, i.e. a sample of eighteen companies exhibiting a low take-up of parental leave.