Working from home during COVID-19 and beyond: Survey evidence from employers

Daniel Erdsiek

No 21-051, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Based on survey responses from more than 1,700 managers in Germany, this study elicits employers' perceptions of working from home during COVID-19 and their long-term expectations for the time after the pandemic. Based on employers' forecasts of the share of employees working from home post-COVID, the within-firm intensity of the expected shift is quantified. Many firms expect a persistent shift towards working from home induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Larger firms and firms with pre-COVID use of working from home are most likely to expect a persistent and intensive shift. As the empirical results indicate, underlying mechanisms for the expected shift might include learning effects facilitating an improved perception of working from home, investments in physical and human capital, a general push in firms' digital progress, and the fact that most firms do not observe a reduction in productivity due to working from home during COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19; working from home; digitalisation; firm-level; managers; survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D23 L22 M54 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eur, nep-hrm and nep-ict
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/235255/1/1761447319.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:zewdip:21051

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).