On working from home in European countries
Abstract
Purpose
The authors analyzed the evolution of working from home (WFH) within industries in 12 European countries in the period 2008–2017 and studied its relationship with information and communication technologies (ICT).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used data from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) to document the trends and levels of WFH within industries in 12 European countries. The authors further used the EU-KLEMS database and a difference-in-difference approach to study whether the fall in prices of ICT is associated with a higher share of employees who work from home in industries that depend more on ICT relative to industries that depend less.
Findings
The authors show that WFH has increased almost everywhere and that there is significant heterogeneity across industries. The authors provide evidence that the fall in prices of ICT is associated with a higher share of employees who work from home in industries that depend more on ICT relative to industries that depend less. This result also holds within age, gender and occupation groups. While the authors find no significant differences among gender and occupation groups, the positive association between the fall in ICT prices and WFH increases with age.
Originality/value
This paper has two main contributions: First, it reports that WFH has increased in European countries in the period 2008–2017. Second, it provides new explorations about the relationship between ICT and WFH by using the price variation of ICT.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Oliver Falck, Gustavo Leyva and the participants of many conferences and seminars for their thoughtful comments. Earlier drafts of this paper have circulated under the title “The Impact of ICT on Working from Home: Evidence from EU Countries.” The authors gratefully acknowledged the funding from the Spanish Government (No: PID2021-126549NB-I00 and PID2022-139468NB-I00 MCIU/AEI/FEDER), UE; the Generalitat of Catalonia (No: 2020-PANDE-00036 and No: 2021-SGR-00862) and the SUSTAINWELL project. The SUSTAINWELL project receives funding from the European Unions Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under (No: 101095175) and the UK Government
Since submission of this article, the following author(s) have updated their affiliation(s): Vahagn Jerbashian is also affiliated at the CESifo, Munich, Germany and GLO, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Citation
Jerbashian, V. and Vilalta-Bufí, M. (2023), "On working from home in European countries", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-02-2023-0080
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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