How do managers form their expectations about working from home? Survey experiments on the perception of productivity

Daniel Erdsiek and Vincent Rost

No 23-018, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: The recent shift towards working from home (WFH) has far-reaching implications for social and economic outcomes. While firms are gatekeepers for the ongoing diffusion of flexible work arrangements, there is little evidence on how firms decide to offer WFH. We leverage two survey experiments among nearly 800 knowledge-intensive services firms in Germany to analyse whether managers' beliefs about the productivity effects of WFH affect their adoption decisions. Exploiting exogenous variation in managers' information set, we find that managers update their beliefs about the productivity effects of WFH when they receive information on workers' self-assessed WFH productivity. In addition, the information treatment significantly increases managers' willingness to adopt or intensify WFH policies. Combining our main survey experiment with two follow-up surveys, we find persistent information treatment effects on both managers' beliefs about WFH productivity and firms' expected WFH intensity after the Covid-19 pandemic. A complementary survey experiment confirms our results pointing to a causal relationship between managers' beliefs about WFH productivity and the adoption of WFH practices. These findings have implications for potential policy measures targeting firms' WFH adoption.

Keywords: working from home; survey experiment; information provision; firm-level; managers; expectations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D23 L22 M54 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eur, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-sbm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:23018

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