The Allocation of Time and Remote Work

Christos A. Makridis

No 12363, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Motivated by large structural shifts in the nature of work since 2020, this paper studies the allocation of time among workers across jobs that vary in their remote intensity. Drawing on the American Time Use Survey between 2018 and 2024, I document three main results. First, time allocated to leisure increased and to work decreased among more remote jobs with little change in home production, shopping, or childcare. These results are robust to alternative longitudinal data from the Gallup Workplace Panel between 2019 and 2025. Time allocated to commuting declined, but only accounts for a small portion of the declines in labor supply. Second, these changes were concentrated among males, singles, and those without children. Third, these declines in labor supply are not associated with productivity declines; sectors with greater remote work intensity exhibited greater productivity growth. I subsequently build and estimate an augmented Roy model, showing that sorting of more productive workers into higher productivity industries accounts for the increase in productivity growth.

Keywords: leisure; remote work; time use; wages; working from home (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 D23 E24 G18 J22 M54 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12363.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:_12363

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 ().