Working from home during and after the covid-19 pandemic: determinants, consequences, and role of collective bargaining – TELEWORKING
We combine rich survey data on job tasks and working conditions with large administrative datasets on firms, employees and the rollout of high-speed internet infrastructure. Using task-based information from repeated surveys since 1991, we build an indicator of job teleworkability with machine learning techniques, and track how the share of teleworkable jobs has evolved over time. In parallel, we use the French Labour Force Survey and employer-based data to measure actual WFH adoption. In a second step, we exploit the staggered deployment of fibre broadband across French municipalities as a natural experiment: municipalities that were connected earlier could adopt WFH more easily, allowing us to estimate its causal impact on job stability and career outcomes.
Our results show that the share of jobs whose task content is compatible with WFH increased markedly from about 14% in 1991 to 45% in 2021, but that actual WFH remained limited to less than one fifth of this potential before the Covid-19 crisis and still falls short of it in 2021.
This implies that the main obstacles to WFH have not been technical constraints, but rather organisational practices, management choices and institutional arrangements. Low-skilled workers, in particular, often hold jobs that have long been teleworkable, yet they made very little use of WFH before the crisis and remain far from their full potential even during the pandemic period.
The project has produced a first peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization on the long-run evolution of job teleworkability in France, and a working paper providing causal evidence on the impact of WFH on job trajectories from country-wide data.
Further papers are in preparation. The teleworkability indicators developed in the project will be made available to the research community and public institutions, in line with ANR’s commitments to open science.
The covid-19 pandemic has generated a massive surge in firm recourse to working from home. This is likely to have launched a “new deal” for working arrangements, with long lasting effects. The project offers to better understand the causes and consequences of teleworking adoption both during the pandemic, within an unusual context and under abnormal working conditions, and afterwards. The first stage of the project is dedicated to identifying the activities that can be done from home and explaining differences across firms and workers in the actual adoption of teleworking among these activities. Beyond its intrinsic interest, one of the objectives of the first stage is to identify sources of variations that are not related to firms’ productivity or workers’ well-being and can be used in a second step to evaluate the impact of teleworking on firms and workers (worker satisfaction, work-life balance, gender inequalities…). A third step will investigate the determinants of the continued use of working from home after the crisis and of its success in a "business as usual" setting.
Project coordination
Thomas Breda (Ecole d'économie de Paris)
The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.
Partnership
EEP Ecole d'économie de Paris
Help of the ANR 291,132 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project:
September 2021
- 42 Months
