Work-from-Home Productivity during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Surveys of Employees and Employers

Masayuki Morikawa

No DP20-007, SSPJ Discussion Paper Series from Service Sector Productivity in Japan: Determinants and Policies, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: Using data from original surveys of employees and employers, this study examines the prevalence, intensity, and productivity of working from home (WFH) practices during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Japan. The results reveal that the mean WFH productivity relative to working at the usual workplace was about 60–70 percent, and it was lower for employees and firms that started WFH practice only after the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is a large dispersion of WFH productivity, both by individual and firm characteristics. Highly educated and high-wage employees tended to exhibit a relatively small reduction in WFH productivity. The results obtained from the employee and employer surveys were generally consistent with each other.

Keywords: COVID-19; productivity; social distancing; working from home (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 I12 J22 J24 M12 M54 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hermes-ir.lib.hit-u.ac.jp/hermes/ir/re/71540/DP20-007.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:hit:sspjdp:dp20-007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSPJ Discussion Paper Series from Service Sector Productivity in Japan: Determinants and Policies, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Resources Section, Hitotsubashi University Library (lib-contents@ad.hit-u.ac.jp).