COVID-19 and remote work: An early look at US data
BibTeX
@techreport{brynjolfsson2020covid,
title={COVID-19 and remote work: An early look at US data},
author={Brynjolfsson, Erik and Horton, John J and Ozimek, Adam and Rock, Daniel and Sharma, Garima and TuYe, Hong-Yi},
year={2020},
institution={National Bureau of Economic Research}
}
Abstract
We report the results of a nationally-representative sample of the US population during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey ran in two waves from April 1-5, 2020 and May 2-8, 2020. Of those employed pre-COVID-19, we find that about half are now working from home, including 35.2% who report they were commuting and recently switched to working from home. In addition, 10.1% report being laid-off or furloughed since the start of COVID-19. There is a strong negative relationship between the fraction in a state still commuting to work and the fraction working from home. We find that the share of people switching to remote work can be predicted by the incidence of COVID-19 and that younger people were more likely to switch to remote work. Furthermore, states with a higher share of employment in information work including management, professional and related occupations were more likely to shift toward working from home and had fewer people laid off or furloughed. We find no substantial change in results between the two waves, suggesting that most changes to remote work manifested by early April.
Notes and Excerpts
To get a real-time sense of how firms and workers are responding, we conducted two waves of surveys using Google Consumer Surveys (GCS), one each in April and May.1 In the April version of the survey we asked a single question: ““Have you started to work from home in the last 4 weeks?” with the following response options: … In the May version, we updated the question to: ““Have you started to work from home in the last 2 months?”
Eyeballing Fig 4, looks like old people might be less inclined to changing whether they commute?