Time Savings When Working from Home2023

This is a very short paper that documents the time savings of working from home (duh). The source uses the Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA), which includes 27 countries. They estimate country-level time savings with the following regression \[Y_{icw}=I_c+X_{icw}\beta+\varepsilon_{icw}\]for person \(i\) in country \(c\) from survey wave \(w\). It turns out that working from home saves a lot of time from commuting, usually between 50 and 70 minutes, most of which are then spent on the job or a secondary job, leisure, and caregiving, with the latter being the least time spent and the first the most. They use a Beckerian notion of time allocation, in which the time saved from commuting can be calculates as a 2.2% of after-tax earnings savings. So clearly good in this measure.

There are no big differences across genders, except in the dimension of caregiving in a household where there are young children present. There is also some heterogeneity across countries, dense urban areas gain more because their commutes are longer (como mi chica ...). There is also some sample selection, as educated workers are overrepresented, which makes sense considering the structure of the social organization of work.

Nothing to heavily dislike.