¶ Telework, wages, and time use in the United States

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¶ BibTeX

@article{pabilonia2022telework,
  title={Telework, wages, and time use in the United States},
  author={Pabilonia, Sabrina Wulff and Vernon, Victoria},
  journal={Review of Economics of the Household},
  pages={1--48},
  year={2022},
  publisher={Springer}
}

¶ Abstract

Using data on full-time wage and salary workers from the 2017–2018 American Time Use Survey Leave and Job Flexibilities Module, we estimate hourly wage differentials for teleworkers and compare how workers allocate their time over the day when they work from home rather than the office. We find that some teleworkers earn a wage premium, but it varies by gender, parental status, and teleworking intensity. Fathers who telework earn more than fathers in office-based jobs, regardless of teleworking intensity. Women without children who telework occasionally earn more than their office counterparts. In industries and occupations where telework is more prevalent, mothers who work from home most days of the week pay a wage penalty compared to mothers in office-based jobs. Using time diaries, we find differences in work patterns and hours across worker groups that could drive these teleworker wage differentials. Most teleworkers work less on home days; however, those who earn wage premiums are working longer hours on weekdays, regardless of their work location. When teleworking, mothers experience more interruptions in their workdays than other workers, which could have negative effects on their productivity. We also find that teleworkers spend less time on commuting and grooming activities but more time on leisure activities and with family on work-at-home days than on office days, and female teleworkers spend more time sleeping and on household production activities.

¶ Notes and Excerpts

Using time diaries, we find that teleworkers spend less time on commuting and grooming activities but more time on leisure and household production activities and more time with family on work-at-home days than office days.

we estimate minutes spent in daily activities on weekday workdays for respondents who work at least four hours

Using the 2001 CPS-WS Supplement, Gariety and Shaffer (2007) show wage premiums associated with WFH in some industries, but wage penalties in other industries. They attribute the negative wage differentials as being driven by preferences for WFH and the positive differentials as being driven by WFH being more productive, either as a result of selection by employers or from workers being able to be more productive while WFH. Using the Decennial Censuses, Oettinger (GHII) documents wage penalties in the 1980 and 1990 censuses, and a small wage premium in the 2000 census for home-based workers

We define a “home-based teleworker” as a worker who works exclusively at home three or more days a week, and an “occasional teleworker” as a worker who works exclusively at home at least once every two weeks and at most two days a week.Footnote9 An “office worker” is a worker who either never works exclusively from home or works exclusively at home less than once every two weeks.

We estimate that, in 2004, 15 percent of wage and salary workers in the US reported that they did some work at home, but only 3 percent of workers worked exclusively at home at least one day every two weeks (Current Population Survey Data at NBER 2004). For additional findings from this supplement, see U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2005).

time diary data are available for only one person per household on a single day; therefore, we are unable to analyze the impact of telecommuting on spousal time allocation, with the exception of couple time together, nor can we compare WFH days to office workdays for the same workers.

We restrict the sample to full-time, non-agricultural wage and salary workers aged 18–64 who usually work at least 35 hours per week on their main job, because we want to be able to compare workers’ time allocation on typical workdays by work location and estimate wage differentials for workers with similar hours. We define a “home-based teleworker” as a worker who works exclusively at home three or more days a week, and an “occasional teleworker” as a worker who works exclusively at home at least once a month and at most two days a week. 6 An “office worker” is a worker who either never works exclusively from home or works exclusively at home less than once a month

we estimate minutes spent in daily activities on weekday workdays for respondents who work at least four hours. … we estimate minutes spent in daily activities on weekday workdays for respondents who work at least four hours.

Work at home day for teleworker indicator equals one if the teleworker … worked at home for at least four hours and worked in the office for zero minutes, and zero otherwise (they may have also worked at another location besides their home such as visiting a client or working at a coffee shop).

For males (Table 3A), we find that office workers spend 23 minutes longer on all work and work-related activities than teleworkers do on their office days and 36 minutes longer than teleworkers do on their WFH days. Teleworkers on their office days also do some work from home, and they work 17 minutes longer at home than office workers

Teleworkers and office workers on office days spend 63 and 57 minutes commuting to work, respectively; thus, teleworkers on WFH days gain about an hour from not having to commute.1 (We calculate commuting time using the trip tour methodology described in Kimbrough (2019))

Less time on grooming, commuting, and food-prep. More time on working, eating, childcare, leisure

We multiply top-coded hourly wages and earnings by 1.5, a common practice in the literature (e.g., Autor et al., 2008).

“Oster betas” with $delta=1$ and $R_{max}=1.3\tilde R$. They say if $\beta^\star$ is opposite sign from OLS estimates, then “the OLS estimates are not robust to correcting for omitted variable bias.”