Abstract
In spring 2020, stay at home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic forced many Americans to work remotely. Simultaneously, these orders shut down schools and daycare centers, leading to anecdotal reports of large increases in multitasking. Specifically, remote workers were engaging in more secondary childcare, which, unlike primary childcare, is linked to negative effects on well-being. Using American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data for the years 2003–2021, we find that remote workers spend more time on secondary childcare than office workers and that remote work exacerbates documented father/mother differences in time spent on secondary childcare. In addition, we find evidence that self-selection into remote work creates sample selection bias, as coefficient magnitudes are reduced when selection into remote work is accounted for via an endogenous treatment model. Finally, we examine the effects of an exogenous shock, the COVID-19 pandemic, on hours spent on secondary childcare via a triple difference model. Again, our results indicate that remote work exacerbates documented father/mother differences in time spent on secondary childcare, likely decreasing mothers’ well-being.
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Data availability
No datasets were genereated or analysed during the current study.
Notes
Our data from the American Time Use Survey (discussed in a later section) reflect similar trends as the percentage of workers who worked remotely increased from around 5% in 2003 to almost 21% in 2021.
Yavorsky et al. (2021) provides a comprehensive review of the literature that examined pandemic related changes in work and family in the United States.
Because of results from Restrepo and Zeballos (2022) we estimated models using only years after the Great Recession. The results are similar to results using all years and are available upon request.
We solely know a respondent’s work location on the diary day. Theoretically, some of those categorized as remote workers never work at a company’s worksite, consistent with most definitions of remote work. However, some respondents categorized as remote workers regularly work at the employers’ worksite, but are working elsewhere on the diary day. These two groups are aggregated in our dataset. So, our definition of remote worker includes all respondents who worked at a location other than their employers worksite on their diary day.
For more information, see the ATUS User’s Guide: https://www.bls.gov/tus/atususersguide.pdf.
Respondents who work solely remotely on their diary day are classified as remote workers.
Respondents are not asked this question when the respondent or all children are asleep because respondents provide inconsistent answers about whether a child is in the respondent’s care while slee**.
Our definition of remote worker depends on the location of the respondent’s work on their diary day. Some of these workers might be hybrid workers who worked fully remotely on their diary day and some of them might be workers who always work remotely. While we are unable to determine the type of work the respondent always engages in, we use the term remote worker in this paper to reflect the work location on the diary day.
We also considered a definition of hybrid workers, remote workers which included workers reporting some of their work hours away from work and some of their work hours on site.
Remote workers could also be thought of as teleworking.
Our definition of full-time worker does not consider total hours worked in a week, and it could be that we are considering some workers that may not be considered full time by our definition of using hours worked on a single diary day.
We perform analysis that separates unmarried respondents into those with no partner, those who have a partner who works, and those who have a partner who does not work. Sample sizes for these subgroups are small and estimates are similar, so we report all unmarried as a single household type.
Specifically, the model is estimated with the etregress command in Stata. We have tried different controls in our selection model including industry, state and COVID fixed effects, and state specific time trends. The estimates are similar and available upon request.
The differential for parents who have a partner that does not work is statistically significant at the 1% level, but for unmarried parents is statistically significant at the 10% level.
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Biehl, A.M., Hayter, J. & Hill, B. Remote work and the effects on secondary childcare. Int Rev Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-024-00466-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-024-00466-7