Working from home and the willingness to accept a longer commute
Date
05/07/2018Keywords
Metadata
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Abstract
It is generally found that workers are more inclined to accept a job that is located farther away from home if they have the ability to work from home one day a week or more (telecommuting). Such findings inform us about the effectiveness of telecommuting policies that try to alleviate congestion and transport related emissions, but they also stress that the geography of labour markets is changing due to information technology. We argue that estimates of the effect of working from home on commuting time may be biased because of sorting based on residential- and commuting preferences. In this paper we investigate the relationship between telecommuting and commuting time, controlling for preference based sorting. We use 7 waves of data from the Dutch Labour Supply Panel and show that on average telecommuters have higher marginal cost of one-way commuting time, compared to non-telecommuters. We estimate the effect of telecommuting on commuting time using a fixed-effects approach and we show that preference based sorting biases cross-sectional results upwards. This suggests that the bias due to sorting based on residential preferences is strongest. Working from home allows people to accept 5 percent longer commuting times on average, and every additional 8 hours of working from home are associated with 3.5 percent longer commuting times.
Citation
de Vos , D , Meijers , E & van Ham , M 2018 , ' Working from home and the willingness to accept a longer commute ' , Annals of Regional Science , vol. First Online . https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-018-0873-6
Publication
Annals of Regional Science
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0570-1864Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2018. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
Funding was provided by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NL) (Grant No. 452-14-004).Collections
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