Teleworkability and its heterogeneity in labor market shock

Dandan Zhang, Chuliang Luo and Yiran Zi

Journal of Asian Economics, 2024, vol. 92, issue C

Abstract: The rapid development of information and communication technologies has brought about a marked change in work patterns, with teleworking emerging as a vital and complementary form of employment. The COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 led to widespread social isolation, accelerating the adoption of teleworking. Following Dingel and Neiman (2020), we construct a teleworkability index for over 4539 employees and analyze the dynamic changes in their working status in China. Our findings suggest that business and technical workers are more likely to work remotely than essential labor workers. Highly educated female workers who live in the southeast of China show the advantage of working from home. Further regression estimation indicates that, throughout 2020, workers with a higher teleworkability index can better cope with adverse shocks from the pandemic with higher return-to-work rates and higher productivity. In contrast, those with a lower teleworkability index face challenges in job retention and suffer from higher unemployment rates and severe income losses. In addition, the teleworkability index is positively associated with mental health status. This study highlights the most vulnerable segment in the labor market, those with low teleworkability, should be well targeted by the social security system.

Keywords: Digital job; Teleworkability; Economic shock; Labor market; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1049007824000368
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:asieco:v:92:y:2024:i:c:s1049007824000368

DOI: 10.1016/j.asieco.2024.101741

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Asian Economics is currently edited by C. Wiemer

More articles in Journal of Asian Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().