When Parents Stay Home: Work-from-Home and Sorting Across Public, Private, and Home Schools

David Agrawal and Iuliia Shybalkina

No 13092, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The U.S. saw a sharp and persistent decline in public school enrollment alongside a surge in homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper examines the role of work-from-home (WFH) in driving these changes. WFH may lower the cost of homeschooling through greater flexibility and reduced commuting, but productivity disruptions and shifts toward private schooling may offset these effects. We combine national data on public and private enrollments with newly assembled district-level homeschooling counts. Using variation in telework potential across local labor markets in a difference-in-differences framework, we find no aggregate decline in public school enrollment, but declines in private enrollment and corresponding temporary increases in homeschooling. The aggregate public school result masks heterogeneity: urban public schools experience declines, partially offset by gains in more remote areas. These enrollment shifts are critical for school finance, as they directly affect state aid formulas and therefore local district spending.

Keywords: work-from-home; homeschooling; public schools; enrollment; state grants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I21 J21 R50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-uep
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp13092.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: When Parents Stay Home: Work-from-Home and Sorting across Public, Private, and Home Schools (2026)
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:_13092

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 ().