What is OFPP?
The Open Family Policy Program (OFPP) is a microsimulation model that encodes family policy legislation.
It currently covers maternity, paternity, and parental leave policy legislation from 28 European countries between the years 2010 and 2020.
The OFPP complements other social policy databases, such as SPIN and the OECD Family Database, but stands out with its ability to show variation in policy entitlements both within and across countries.
What does OFPP do?
The OFPP was designed to be used in combination with micro-level datasets. It was developed using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) micro-level data and is fully compatible with this dataset.
The primary role of the OFPP is to identify individuals who fulfil the eligibility conditions of specific family policies. It also estimates cash benefits and the duration of benefit payments.
How is OFPP different?
Unlike policy databases that use ideal family types as the basis for their policy indicators, the OFPP uses the concept of hypothetical parents, treating all survey respondents of childbearing age as potential parents.
The socio-economic situation of these respondents serves as the basis for estimating their family policy entitlements.
The OFPP honours Open Science principles by being available as open-source code that can be freely adjusted to fit researchers’ needs.
Motivation for the OFPP
There are many readily available policy indicators that capture the generosity of (family) cash benefits (e.g. SPIN, OECD Family Database, Comparative Family Policy Database, etc.). The most common indicators capture benefit levels, replacement rates, and the duration of benefit payments. For these indicators to be comparable across countries and over time, it is necessary to agree on a static reference point to which policy design will be compared to. An ideal family type serves as this static point for estimating eligibility for specific cash benefits and the level of benefit payment. This is typically a dual-earner couple with one or more children of a certain age.
Although these indicators are useful for understanding policy development and changes, they fall short in our understanding of how the policies benefit the populations for which they were designed. We don’t usually have a reference for how prominent the selected ideal type in each country is. Without similar estimates for a wide range of ideal family types we also don’t know how well these policies perform when it comes to more vulnerable groups such as low-income or single parents.
Since the 2000s, the range and quality of survey data have considerably improved. So rather than expanding the range of ideal family types for which we calculate policy indicators, we can apply the legislation to survey data. This way, we gain rich and versatile information about policy designs and their variation across different populations.
How does OFPP work?
The Open Family Policy Program (OFPP) is simply a collection of codes that capture the legislative content of various family policies. Survey data are necessary for the OFPP to work. It is what allows us to visualize how these policies project on the population and how they vary across different social groups.
The original OFPP codes were written of micro-level EU-SILC data. At the time and to date, EU-SILC is one of the most comprehensive comparative datasets for European countries. It contains both cross-sectional and panel data with monthly information on respondents’ economic activity. This is vital information for estimating eligibility to many (family) policies and the main reason why EU-SILC was selected for the OFPP. Nevertheless, the code was designed to be easily adjustable and fitted for other rich survey data.
Hypothetical parents
Hypothetical parents are all survey respondents of childbearing age. In other words, all respondents who are at risk of becoming parents. This is a crucial concept for the OFPP. It allows for the projection of policy designs onto the entire population that may be exposed to specific risks, such as childbirth in this case. This way, the OFPP shows us how the distribution of entitlements would look if all people of childbearing age suddenly became parents. This approach eliminates issues associated with selection to parenthood and issues with low sample sizes for some groups, which can skew our understanding of the impact of the policy design.
Although the OFPP codes are written for hypothetical parents, it’s possible for users to adjust the code to fit the OFPP for actual parents.
What data does OFPP produce?
At this point, OFPP contains codes for maternity, paternity, and parental leave policies in 28 European countries between the years 2010 and 2020. Currently, we are updating the codes beyond the year 2020. The OFPP produces the following micro-level indicators for maternity, paternity and parental leave:
- Eligibility – indicates whether a hypothetical parent would be eligible for a specific policy
- Duration of benefit payment
- Cash benefit level in the first month of leave
- Average cash benefit over the duration of leave
How can OFPP be used?
The Open Family Policy Program (OFPP) produces highly versatile data that can fit many research questions. The data can be used both on a micro-level or be aggregated to produce macro-level indicators.
One of these macro-level indicators is the proportion of people who would be eligible for leave policies if they were to become parents. The proportion of the eligible population is rather a unique feature of the OFPP (for other work that used similar approach, see the EIGE report on Parental leave eligibility for parental leave in EU Member States).
Another macro-level indicator is the replacement rate, which takes into account the income distribution in population, as well as policy designs such as caps on benefits or minimum cash benefits. Another indicator of benefit generosity that can be aggregated from the data produced by OFPP is the variation in benefit payment.
On the micro-level, the indicators can be used to analyze the accessibility of family policies for parents with different socio-economic background.
The eligibility variables created by the OFPP mark a likely exposure to family policies and provide more accurate conditions for measuring policy effects than most available macro-level policy indicators.
The OFPP can also be combined with other data to study the complex issue of policy take-up. Unfortunately, this is not possible at this point on a cross-country comparative level because EU-SILC does not currently provide data on the use of maternity, paternity, or parental leave policies.
OFPP Publications
‘Genderising’ aspects of birth-related leave policies and fertility behaviour in Europe
PhD thesis
I started coding leave policies during my PhD to study the effect of policies on transitions to first and second births. My PhD thesis is the OFPP prototype.
Measuring Policy Entitlements at the Micro Level
Peer-reviewed article
Describes versatility of the OFPP and demonstrates possible applications in research.
Making Parental Leave Policies Work for Single Mothers
Peer-reviewed article
Applies OFPP on real single mothers to study the effect of eligibility to parental leave and employment outcomes.
The critical juncture of childbirth: turbulence in the employment trajectories of Mothers in Europe
Preprint
Applies OFPP on real parents and constructs sequences of their labour market activity over the period of two years after birth.
Methodology Report, v.1.0
Contains details on construction of OFPP and individual variables.
This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 893008.
Alžběta Bártová 