Who and how many can work from home? Evidence from task descriptions

Abstract

The Covid-19 crisis has forced great societal changes, including forcing many to work from home (WFH) in an effort to limit the spread of the disease. The ability to work from home has long been considered a perk, but we have few estimates of how many jobs are actually possible to be performed from home. This paper proposes a method to estimate the share of these jobs. For each occupation, we obtain a WFH friendly measure by asking respondents from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to evaluate whether the corresponding tasks can be performed from home based on the descriptions from the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO-08) standard. The share of WFH friendly jobs in an economy can then be estimated by combining these measures with the labor statistics on occupational employments. Using Norway as an illustrating example, we find that approximately 38% of Norwegian jobs can be performed from home. The Norwegian results also suggest that the pandemic and the government’s attempts to mitigate this crisis may have a quite uneven impact on the working population. Those who are already disadvantaged are often less likely to have jobs that can be performed from home.

Exploring the relationship between trust and participatory processes: Participation in urban development in Oslo, Madrid and Melbourne

“…The second -and larger -group consists of people in occupations where teleworking became more prevalent during the pandemic. Estimates of the share of jobs that can be performed remotely in different occupational groups in Norway (Holgersen et al, 2020) suggest that clerical support workers, managers and professionals have particularly high shares of teleworking-friendly jobs, and these occupational groups also had clearly elevated out-migration from Oslo to other parts of Norway in 2020. No similar increase is seen for craft and trade workers, and elementary workers (including cleaners): occupations where it is hard to work from home.…”

Social Disparities in Adopting Non-pharmaceutical Interventions During COVID-19 in Norway

“…On the other hand, low-skilled young people, single parents, and immigrants were less likely to have access to remote-friendly jobs. There was also a regional difference: cities and regions with higher population density had larger percentages of jobs that could be done from home (Holgersen et al, 2020). In the UK, being able to work from home was correlated with higher education, higher income, more savings, and people who own their own houses (Atchison et al, 2020).…”

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Working Conditions, Employment, Career Development and Well-Being of Refugee Researchers

“…Research carried out in Norway to explore the share of jobs that can be carried out from home, found that only 38% of the Norwegian jobs can be considered as being conducive for WFH. The geographical and social context is crucial with urban areas having a higher ratio of WFH positions than rural areas, and vulnerable parts of the society (i.e., migrants, single parents, low qualified workers) have less likelihood to get such jobs [10]. A lower share of jobs with the WFH options is found in East Germany and a much higher share in urban areas, such as, Berlin, Darmstadt, Hamburg and Munich [11].…”

“…A lower share of jobs with the WFH options is found in East Germany and a much higher share in urban areas, such as, Berlin, Darmstadt, Hamburg and Munich [11]. Analysis of data from several countries has shown that richer and more developed countries have had a higher number of jobs that can be run from home [10], whereas in regions with a low share of WFH jobs, a lower average income has been observed [11].…”