Remote Work and Women's Labor Supply: The New Gender Division at Home

Isabella Di Filippo, Bruno Escobar and Juan Facal

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study how increases in remote work opportunities for men affect their spouses' labor supply. Exploiting variation in the change in work-from-home (WFH) exposure across occupations before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that increases in husbands' WFH exposure lead to sizable improvements in wives' labor-market outcomes: annual employment rises by roughly 2.5 percentage points (from a 69% pre-treatment mean), earnings increase by about 5%, weekly hours worked rise by roughly half an hour, weeks worked increase by about 1.3%, and the likelihood of part-time work declines by approximately 9%. Evidence from time-use diaries and childcare questionnaires suggests these effects are driven by intra-household reallocation of child-caring time: women are less likely to engage in primary childcare activities, while men working at home partially compensate by covering more for their spouse. These results highlight the role of collective household decision-making in shaping the labor market consequences of remote work.

Date: 2025-08, Revised 2026-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08184 Latest version (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:arx:papers:2508.08184

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().