Work from Home and Firm Productivity: The Role of ICT and Size

Filippo Boeri, Riccardo Crescenzi and Davide Rigo

No 12253, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Using administrative firm-level data covering the universe of remote workers in Italy, and leveraging exogenous pre-pandemic variation in firm-specific access to fibre broadband as an instrument, this paper investigates the impact of post-pandemic adoption of work from home (WFH) on firm productivity. We find that WFH had a large negative impact on productivity during the pandemic. However, larger firms and those with prior ICT investments mitigated these losses. In the longer term, the impact of WFH is no longer significant. Yet, we find suggestive evidence that firms employing highly qualified workers experienced productivity gains.

Keywords: work from home; firms; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 J21 J24 L25 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12253.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:ces:ceswps:_12253

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().