Intra-household exposure to labor market risk in the time of Covid-19: lessons from Mexico

Cecilia Peluffo () and Mariana Viollaz
Additional contact information
Cecilia Peluffo: University of Florida

Review of Economics of the Household, 2021, vol. 19, issue 2, No 4, 327-351

Abstract: Abstract The ability to work from home can be critical during pandemics. We calculate an index that measures the possibility of working from home based on the characteristics of the pre-Covid-19 pandemic distribution of occupations and on internet access at home, using microdata for Mexico. Focusing on households with two partners employed in nonessential occupations, we show that there is high within-household correlation in the possibility of working remotely, which is likely to be positively associated with job stability during the pandemic. Poor families, with low access to formal credit and who rely heavily on informal mechanisms for consumption smoothing have lower chances of working remotely than richer families with higher access to formal credit. High within-household correlation in the work-from-home index restricts the likelihood of intra-household risk-sharing and consumption smoothing, and is likely to contribute to an increase in inequality.

Keywords: Intra-household exposure to labor market risk; Work from home; Inequality; Covid-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J22 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-020-09541-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:reveho:v:19:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11150-020-09541-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-020-09541-8

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().