EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

F.O.G. and Teleworking: Some Labor Economics of covid-19

Jacques Bughin and Michele Cincera

No 2020-21, Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: FOG (« fear of going back to work ») is a new acronym reflecting workers stress to become contamined by covid-19. In response, firms have been offering protections, extending teleworking as a way to continue to work during the pandemics. Leveraging a classical epidemiologic SIR model, we study how pandemics such as Covid 19 affect labor market, when the labor productivity is tied to the value of interactions, and under wage negotiations. Despite relatively schematic, our modelling highlights that workers participation during pandemics is dependent on reservation wages, and that the final dynamics are also critically dependent on a mix of health and wealth factors such as age, work interactions, workers power, and productivity of interactions. In general, teleworking may be a way to restore work participation, even if teleworking may be less productive, to the extent that the productivity gap can be compensated by a much higher protection of workers.

Keywords: pandemics; covid-19; labor participation; teleworking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J22 J23 J33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 p.
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published by:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/3088 ... GHIN_CINCERA-fog.pdf Full text for the whole work, or for a work part (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: F.O.G. and teleworking: Some labor economics of covid-19 (2020) Downloads
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:eca:wpaper:2013/308839

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/308839

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:eca:wpaper:2013/308839