Working from Home: Heterogenous Effects on Hours Worked and Wages

Working from home has become more and more common, especially among high-skill workers, since the early 2000s. In this paper we investigate how such alternative work arrangements affect hours of work including overtime, wages, job and life satisfaction. We exploit five waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel between 1997 and 2014, a period during which the revolution in telecommunication technologies has dramatically reduced the costs to perform certain tasks at home. Controlling for individual fixed effects, we find that home-based work has led to an expansion of overtime hours among full-time employees, especially among women. However, these overtime hours seem to pay off in terms of wages for men only. We do not find that childless women are affected differently from mothers. We also control for selection into employment in a panel setting when time-varying unobserved preferences or characteristics may affect employment decision.