The pandemic caused a massive rise in working from home and now, even though lockdowns are long since over and many workers have returned to the workplace, we are beginning to understand working from home (WFH) a lot better. Two new studies have recently added to our understanding.
The first is this article by Cevat Giray Aksoy (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and co-authors, published in the AEA Papers and Proceedings (ungated earlier version here). They use data from the monthly US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, limiting their data to the period from January 2024 to December 2025, and document three facts about WFH. First, employees are more likely to work from home if they work for a younger firm, and peaks among those working for employers that were founded in the height of the pandemic, in 2020.
Second, employees are more likely to work from home if they work at a firm with a younger CEO. Specifically:
Firms led by CEOs under 30 have an average of 1.4 WFH days per week, compared with 1.1 days at firms led by CEOs who are 60 or older.
That doesn't seem like a lot, but an additional 0.3 days per week is a little more than three working weeks per year of WFH for those working for the youngest CEOs compared with those working for the oldest. However, this relationship between CEO age and WFH appears to be partly explained by the fact that younger CEOs are more likely to be leading younger firms. When Aksoy et al. put both CEO age and firm age in the same regression model, only firm age remains statistically significant. It is a similar story for CEO gender, which is initially statistically significant, but since female CEOs tend to be younger and to be CEOs of younger firms, CEO gender isn't statistically significant once those other variables are controlled for.
Third, the self-employed are much more likely to work from home. Specifically:
Self-employed workers report two to three times as many WFH days per week as wage and salary employees, depending on employer size. Compared to wage and salary employees, the self-employed are more than three times as likely to work in a fully remote capacity.
This last result is not entirely surprising, given that the self-employed typically have a lot more flexibility over scheduling. And, the self-employed may be the type of people who most value flexibility as well.
The second new article is this one by Natalia Emanuel (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), Emma Harrington (University of Virginia), and Amanda Pallais (Harvard University), published in the prestigious journal Science (open access). They look at the mental health impacts of WFH, using US data from a variety of sources, and a difference-in-differences approach. This involves comparing occupations that are more or less amenable to WFH, between the time before the pandemic and the time after the pandemic. They refer to the occupations that are more amenable to WFH as 'remotable'.
Emanuel et al. first document the dramatic rise of WFH:
The pandemic led to a large increase in remote work for those in remotable jobs, such that by 2024, workers in remotable jobs spent 31.1% of workdays fully remote, whereas people in nonremotable jobs spent only 8.9% fully remote... Those in remotable jobs experienced a 17.9 percentage point (pp) differential increase in fully remote work...
They then show that this rise is associated with more time spent alone:
Along with spending less time in the office, workers in remotable jobs spent more time working alone after the pandemic, logging 1.2 more work hours alone per day relative to nonremotable workers (58.0% increase; P < 0.0001).
Even for those of us who are introverts, more alone time may not necessarily be a good thing. Emanuel et al. are concerned about how WFH and working alone affects mental health. Their main outcome variable is the Kessler (K-6) Psychological Distress Scale, which is:
...based on how often in the past 30 days the respondent felt worthless, hopeless, restless, nervous, that everything is an effort, or so sad that nothing could cheer them up...
Their main source of data is the Panel Study of Income Dynamics covering the period from 2011 to 2023 (from which they exclude the pandemic years 2020 and 2021). Analysing that data, they find that:
Between the pre-and postpandemic periods, mental distress increased for everyone, but it increased significantly more for those in remotable jobs...
Among those in remotable jobs, there was a 0.3 unit increase in the K-6 distress score relative to an average score of 3.0 before the pandemic (standard deviation change = 0.08; P = 0.063) in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). In the National Health Interview Study (NHIS), we found the same 0.3 unit deterioration (P = 0.007). We saw deterioration in each of the six subcomponents of the K-6 distress scale: feeling worthless, hopeless, restless, nervous, that everything is an effort, and so sad that nothing can cheer them up...
Importantly, the deterioration in mental health is concentrated among people living alone, which is consistent with the idea that WFH affects mental health through increasing social isolation. Emanuel et al. also find that people in remotable jobs are more likely to seek help from a mental health practitioner, and take relatively more prescription medications for mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression. These changes aren't simply the result of greater flexibility allowing more time to be devoted to health care generally, as there was no change in visits to the doctor and no change for other prescription medications such as statins.
Finally, Emanuel et al. looked at whether the rise of generative AI, rather than the increase in WFH, might explain the results (an important check, given the paper I will blog about tomorrow). They find that results from the same analysis, but substituting an AI occupational exposure index in place of the 'remotability' index, are not statistically significant.
Now, many workers are very keen on WFH - as noted in this post, about half of Australian workers would be willing to give up some salary in order to work from home. Why would people choose more WFH if it may worsen their mental health? Of course, a rational worker would weigh up the benefits and costs of WFH, and may decide that the mental health costs are more than offset by other benefits. However, Emanuel et al. point to another related possibility, which is:
...that the benefits of remote work (e.g., skipping a daily commute) are immediate and salient, whereas the costs of remote work (e.g., frayed connections with co-workers) take time to materialize.
So, a rational worker may be essentially weighing up benefits that occur today, against uncertain costs that may occur sometime in the future and therefore should be discounted (in the same way that we should discount future cashflows in a financial analysis). In that sort of exercise, where the mental health costs are discounted, it is more likely that workers would choose to work from home. They would be even more likely to do so if they are quasi-rational and heavily discount the future, as I note in the first week of my ECONS102 class. In that case, the mental health costs would be heavily discounted. Finally, maybe workers are simply unaware of the mental health costs of WFH. If that is the case, then an information intervention might be helpful in improving mental health among workers who would otherwise be WFH. In the meantime, this research suggests that the post-pandemic rise in WFH may have contributed to some part of the growing mental health crisis, especially through increased time spent alone.
[HT: Marginal Revolution for the Emanuel et al. article]
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