Heterogeneity in Work from Home: Evidence from Six U.S. Datasets

Abstract

This article documents heterogeneity in work from home (WFH) using six nationally representative U.S. surveys. These surveys show consistent patterns indicating that pre-pandemic differences in WFH rates by sex, education, and state of residence expanded following the COVID-19 outbreak. The surveys also show similar post-pandemic trends in WFH by firm size and industry. We find that an industry’s WFH potential was highly correlated with actual WFH during the first year or two of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this correlation was much weaker before and after, suggesting that WFH potential is a necessary but not sufficient determinant of actual WFH.

Introduction

The ability to work from home (WFH) varies greatly among workers. For example, Dingel and Neiman (2020) use O^∗NET data to classify occupations by WFH potential and find that at most 37 percent of jobs in the U.S. could be performed entirely from home. Moreover, several articles document substantial variation in actual WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic across different demographic groups and locations (see, e.g., Mondragon and Wieland, 2022; Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, 2023; or Bick, Blandin, and Mertens, 2023). These findings show that benefits and spillover effects from WFH will be unevenly distributed across workers and locations.

Most existing work documenting variation in WFH focuses on a cross section from one particular time period and dataset. The contribution of this article is to use multiple data sources to document differences in the evolution of WFH across demographic groups, U.S. states, and firm characteristics since the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020. We study four surveys run by the U.S. Census Bureau: the American Community Survey (ACS), the Current Population Survey (CPS), the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We also study two privately run surveys: the Real-Time Population Survey (RPS) and the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA).