Work from home and household behaviors

Molina, Jose Alberto and Salvatierra, Alba and Velilla, Jorge (2025): Work from home and household behaviors.

Abstract

This paper analyzes work from home from a household perspective, focusing on its various relationships with spouses’ wages, household labor supply, expenditures, and chores. We use a collective model that predicts that work-from-home decisions result from joint utility maximization. Using data from the PSID (2011-2021), we find that both partners’ wages and hours are associated with their own and their spouse’s WFH status in pooled specifications, but these associations weaken substantially when accounting for endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity. Instrumental variable estimates suggest that wage effects are partly driven by occupational sorting, while fixed effects models reveal that changes in WFH status are strongly correlated across spouses but largely unrelated to short-term changes in wages or hours. Implications point to the need for models of remote work that incorporate intra-household dynamics, and to the importance of recognizing WFH as a negotiated outcome rather than an individual choice.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: work from home; collective model, PSID data
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D1 - Household Behavior and Family Economics > D10 - General; D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D79 - Other; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor > J22 - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

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