Luxembourg Employment Study

THE LUXEMBOURG Employment Study (LES) is a database containing labor force characteristics. It was created in the 1990s by means of surveys. The study gathered a large amount of data on individuals in families. The 13 major categories of data are: demographic, work status, employment characteristics of the main job, information about a second job, previous work experience of person not in employment, searching for employment, situation of inactive persons, education and training, situation one year before survey, labor force status, earnings and income, technical items, and slot variables.

Within each of the 13 categories of the survey are 90 places for information to be gathered for each person. For example, within the demographic category data were gathered on relationship to reference person in the household, sex, age, marital status, nationality, years of residence in this country, country of birth, ethnicity, region, urban or rural indicator, household type, family type, number of persons in household, number of children in household, number of employed in household, number of pensioners in household, and usual/main economic status.

The LES uses several international classification systems to evaluate the people in the survey. These classification systems include the International Standard Classification of the Occupations (ISCO), the General Industrial Classification of Economic Activities within the European Communities (NACE), the International Standard Industrial Classification of all Economic Activities (ISIC), and the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED).

Nearly two dozen European countries and the United States have participated in the study. The data are now available for researchers. LES provides a database of labor force surveys that allow different features of the labor market to be analyzed in a comparative way. For example a researcher might be interested in unemployed, middle-aged women out of the labor force with some education. The data were standardized and digitally stored by the government of Luxembourg in its mainframe computer at the Centre Informatique de l’Etat.

Using SPSS or SAS programming language, a researcher can analyze the data with an individually designed research design. Users of the system are required to register and to sign a statement obligating them to properly identify themselves and to conduct only ethical research.

Since the data are computerized it allows researchers to probe the database with questions. The database is so constructed that national microdata and standardized data are available, but access to the original surveys is not available, thus guaranteeing privacy to the original individual respondents to the survey.

Researchers using the LES include academics, marketing firms, labor researchers, and financial institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Texas. The ability to analyze new data with the standardized data of the LES gives such researchers a powerful tool for understanding current labor conditions and the prospects for future trends.