Omar Bamieh

Abstract:

Using a revealed preference approach applied to administrative linked employer-employee data from Austria—which uniquely combine employment and wage records with information on the annual number of days each worker spent working from home—we quantify the value workers place on remote work as a non-wage amenity. Voluntary job transitions imply that workers would accept a 0.036 percent wage reduction for a 1 percent increase in annual work-from-home (WFH) days, and a 22 percent wage reduction for having access to any remote work at all. A compensating variation analysis, which integrates over the full gap between actual and preferred annual WFH days for all workers, implies an average welfare cost of about 15 percent of wages. The valuation is highly heterogeneous: women value WFH more than men at every point of the WFH distribution, and full-time working mothers would accept a 55 percent wage cut for access to any remote work—roughly four times the valuation of fathers. Auxiliary evidence from the European Working Conditions Survey indicates that, conditional on occupation, sector, pay and demographics, WFH is not systematically bundled with other valued amenities: its co-movement with autonomy is offset by co-movement with disamenities such as work-life intrusion.