A Statistical Assessment of Work-from-home Participation During Different Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically transformed industry, healthcare, mobility, and education. Many workers have been forced to shift to work-from-home, adjust their commute patterns, and/or adopt new behaviors. This paper focuses on two major shifts along different stages of the pandemic. First, it investigates switching to work-from-home during the pandemic, followed by assessing the likelihood of continuing to work-fromhome as opposed to returning to the workplace. Using a survey collected in July and August of 2020 in the U.S., it is found that nearly 50 percent of the respondents who did not workfrom-home before but started to work-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic, indicated the willingness to continue work-from-home. The methodological approach used to study work-from-home probabilities in this paper captures the complexities of human behavior by estimating two random parameters logit models with heterogeneity in the means and variances of random parameters.