Note:
I've been retired since January 2005 so the working at home question did not affect me. I don't call publishing my three blogs "work". But someone I know who is still working initially liked working from home. Saved a long drive to and from work. But after a few months the same person was talking about retiring, unhappy that he couldn't afford to do so for a few more years. He mentioned getting a new boss. But didn't get to meet the new boss for a while, until they arranged to meet at a local restaurant. Strange.
Ye Editor
Carefully selected quotes
by Ye Editor
"Abstract
Evaluating the economic impact of “social distancing” measures taken to arrest the spread of COVID-19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy: how many jobs can be performed at home?
We classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations and merge this classification with occupational employment counts.
We find that 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home, with significant variation across cities and industries.
These jobs typically pay more than jobs that cannot be done at home and account for 46% of all US wages.
Applying our occupational classification to 85 other countries reveals that lower-income economies have a lower share of jobs that can be done at home.
1. Introduction
... We use surveys describing the typical experience of US workers in nearly 1000 occupations to classify each occupation as able or unable to be done entirely from home.
... Developing and emerging market countries with per capita GDP levels below one-third of US levels may only have half as many jobs that can be done from home.
Our measure, which was constructed using pre-pandemic data, correlates well with early estimates of the share of workers who have in fact worked from home during the crisis.
Our online replication package reproduces and details all results summarized in the paper.
We hope our work proves useful in identifying sectors that can safely operate without spreading the virus,
in characterizing which workers face greater economic and health risks, and in pondering the likelihood of a future, after the public health crisis abates, in which remote working is far more common.
... We classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations using the responses to two surveys included in release 24.2 of the database administered by O*NET, a program sponsored by the US Department of Labor to improve our understanding of the nature of work and the workforce.
The O*NET database contains hundreds of standardized and occupation-specific descriptors on almost 1000 occupations.
The first survey is called the Work Context Questionnaire and includes questions aiming to capture the “physical and social factors that influence the nature of work” such as interpersonal relationships, physical work conditions, and structural job characteristics.
The second survey is called the Generalized Work Activities Questionnaire and includes questions aiming to capture the “general types of job behaviors occurring on multiple jobs”
such as the input of information, interaction with others, mental processes, and work output.
The median occupation had 26 respondents for each Work Context question and 25 respondents for each Generalized Work Activities question.
If any of the following conditions in the Work Context survey responses are true for an occupation, we code that occupation as one that cannot be performed at home:
Average respondent says they use email less than once per month (Q4)
Average respondent says they deal with violent people at least once a week (Q14)
Majority of respondents say they work outdoors every day (Q17 & Q18)
Average respondent says they are exposed to diseases or infection at least once a week (Q29)
Average respondent says they are exposed to minor burns, cuts, bites, or stings at least once a week (Q33)
Average respondent says they spent majority of time walking or running (Q37)
Average respondent says they spent majority of time wearing common or specialized protective or safety equipment (Q43 & Q44)
If any of the following conditions in the Generalized Work Activities survey responses are true, we code the occupation as one that cannot be performed at home:
Performing General Physical Activities is very important (Q16A)
Handling and Moving Objects is very important (Q17A)
Controlling Machines and Processes [not computers nor vehicles] is very important (Q18A)
Operating Vehicles, Mechanized Devices, or Equipment is very important (Q20A)
Performing for or Working Directly with the Public is very important (Q32A)
Repairing and Maintaining Mechanical Equipment is very important (Q22A)
Repairing and Maintaining Electronic Equipment is very important (Q23A)
Inspecting Equipment, Structures, or Materials is very important (Q4A)
We then merge this information with BLS data on the number and wages of workers in each standard occupational classification (SOC) code in the country as a whole as well as in metropolitan areas and industries.
... Our classification implies that 37% of US jobs can plausibly be performed at home.
Our classification uses job characteristics that clearly rule out the possibility of working entirely from home and neglects many characteristics that would merely make working from home difficult.
It is, therefore, an upper bound on what might be feasible and greatly exceeds the share of jobs that in fact have been performed entirely at home in recent years.
According to the 2018 American Time Use Survey, less than a quarter of all full-time workers work at all from home on an average day, and even those workers typically spend well less than half of their working hours at home.
... Table 1. Share of jobs that can be done at home,
by occupation's major group.
Occupation O*NET-derived baseline
15 Computer and Mathematical Occupations 1.00 1.00
25 Education, Training, and Library Occupations 0.98 0.85
23 Legal Occupations 0.97 0.84
13 Business and Financial Operations Occupations 0.88 0.92
11 Management Occupations 0.87 0.84
27 Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations0.76 0.57
43 Office and Administrative Support Occupations 0.65 0.51
17 Architecture and Engineering Occupations 0.61 0.88
19 Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations 0.54 0.36
21 Community and Social Service Occupations 0.37 0.50
41 Sales and Related Occupations 0.28 0.21
39 Personal Care and Service Occupations 0.26 0.00
33 Protective Service Occupations 0.06 0.00
29 Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations 0.05 0.06
53 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations 0.03 0.00
31 Healthcare Support Occupations 0.02 0.00
45 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations 0.01 0.00
51 Production Occupations 0.01 0.00
49 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations 0.01 0.00
47 Construction and Extraction Occupations 0.00 0.00
35 Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations 0.00 0.00
37 Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations 0.00 0.00
... There is a clear positive relationship between our work-from-home measure and the typical hourly earnings at the occupation level.
Mongey et al. (2020) use a variant of our occupational classification to study the characteristics of individuals who cannot work at home.
They find that these individuals are more likely to be lower-income, lack a college degree, rent their dwellings, be non-white, and lack employer-provided health insurance.
6. Conclusion
Due to COVID-19, many employees are unable to travel to work.
Identifying which jobs cannot be performed from home is useful as policymakers try to target social insurance payments to those that most need them.
Likewise, the share of jobs that could be performed at home is an important input to predicting the economy's performance during this or subsequent periods of social distancing.
We note, however, that it is not straightforward to use these values to estimate the share of output that would be produced under stringent stay-at-home policies.
An individual worker's productivity may differ considerably when working at home rather than her usual workplace.
More importantly, there are likely important complementarities between jobs that can be performed at home and those that cannot.
Incorporating our measures together with these richer considerations is a fruitful avenue for future research.
Appendix A.
Table A.1.
Contributions of O*NET survey questions
to classification of occupations.
O*NET survey condition
Cannot do at home
GWA23: Repairing and Maintaining Electronic Equipment
WC14: Deal with violent people weekly
GWA22: Repairing and Maintaining Mechanical Equipment
WC33: Exposed to minor burns, cuts, bites, or stings weekly
WC17/18: Majority of respondents say outdoors every day
GWA18: Controlling Machines and Processes
GWA20: Operating Vehicles, Mechanized Devices, or Equipment
WC29: Exposed to diseases or infection weekly
GWA17: Handling and Moving Objects
GWA16: Performing General Physical Activities
GWA4: Inspecting Equipment, Structures, or Materials
WC4: Use email less than once per month
GWA32: Performing for or Working Directly with the Public
WC37: Majority of time walking or running
WC43/44: Majority of time wearing protective or safety equipment
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