Teleworking and Remote Schooling During the Pandemic

Abstract

The pandemic resulted in a very large increase in teleworking. In addition, school closings led to a large number of students attending school remotely. An NLSY97 COVID-19 pandemic supplement in the spring of 2021 makes it possible to examine the relationship between these two occurrences. My findings indicate that remote schooling by a parent’s child led to a sizable increase in the likelihood of working at home 10 hours or more. After controlling for endogeneity, there is no indication of reverse causation. The responsiveness of teleworking to remote schooling depended crucially on how suitable an individual’s job was to teleworking. Remote schooling had a quite substantial effect on the likelihood of teleworking in jobs that were well suited for teleworking and no effect in jobs that were poorly suited. When one estimates separate equations for men and women, one finds that the effect of remote schooling on the likelihood of teleworking was much larger for women than for men. Furthermore, the effect of remote schooling on the likelihood that women teleworked was magnified when a spouse or partner was absent from the household. While parents no longer need to contend with remote schooling, the flexibility allowed by jobs that are well suited for teleworking enables individuals in such jobs to better meet the demands of childcare and other household responsibilities JEL Classification Code: J22