Germany's Capacities to Work from Home

Arbeitspapier

Due to the COVID-19 crisis and the related "social distancing" measures, working from home (WfH) has suddenly become a crucial lever of economic activity. This paper combines survey and administrative data to compute measures for the feasibility of working from home among German employees. Breaking down the data by occupation, region, industry, and employee characteristics, we document considerable variation in the potential to WfH across all dimensions. We find that WfH is feasible for roughly 56 percent of the overall German workforce, while less than half of this potential was exploited in the pre-pandemic economy.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 13152

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity ; Time Allocation and Labor Supply ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity ; Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes ; Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity
• Subject: Germany ; working from home ; COVID-19

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Alipour, Jean-Victor ; Falck, Oliver ; Schüller, Simone
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/216464
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET