Foundation ownership and parental leave uptake: Evidence from a Danish reform

Denmark’s 2002 parental leave reform extended job-protected leave from 26 to 52 weeks, creating a natural experiment for examining how ownership structure affects employee responses to family-friendly policies. Using matched employer–employee administrative data and a difference-in-differences design, we compare parental leave uptake in foundation-owned firms with that in matched family-owned firms. Foundation-owned firms experienced a significantly larger increase following the reform: employees took between 1.3 and 2.0 additional weeks of leave. This differential effect is robust across coarsened exact matching and propensity score matching specifications, holds for both high- and low-tenure employees and for both full-time and part-time workers, and operates broadly across the workforce rather than being concentrated among specific employee subgroups. These findings provide the first quasi-experimental evidence that ownership form conditions how statutory employment rights translate into actual employee behavior. • Natural experiment: Denmark’s 2002 parental leave doubling (26 to 52 weeks). • Foundation-owned firms: employees take 1.3–2 more weeks of leave. • Matched employer–employee data with Coarsened Exact Matching. • Stronger leave response in foundation firms across full-time status and tenure. • First quasi-experimental evidence on foundation ownership and employees.