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Office of Survey Methods Research
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Published Year: 2024
Survey/Program(s): Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics
Catalog: Economic Working Paper
WP Number: WP-574
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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. 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. The effect of remote schooling on the likelihood of teleworking was much larger for women than for men and the effect for women was magnified when a spouse or partner was absent from the household. While parents no longer need to contend with remote schooling, the results in this paper suggest that the flexibility allowed by jobs that are well suited for teleworking enables individuals to better meet the demands of childcare and other household responsibilities.