How many Jobs can be done at Home?
This is based on the research paper “How many Jobs can be done at Home?” by Jonathan I. Dingel and Brent Neiman.
It’s believed that 37 percent of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home.
Evaluating the economic impact of “social distancing” measures taken to arrest the spread of COVID-19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy: how many jobs can be performed at home?
They classified the feasibility of working at home for all occupations using the responses to two surveys namely
Work Context Questionnaire which includes questions aiming to capture the interpersonal relationships, physical work conditions, and structural job characteristics
And Generalized Work Activities Questionnaire which includes questions aiming to capture the input of information, interaction with others, mental processes, and work output.
And merged the above information with data on the number and wages of workers in each occupation.
Their research showed some very interesting points. Below are the results for the US.
First, 37 percent of US jobs can plausibly be performed at home. Managers, educators, and those working in computers, finance, and law are largely able to work from home. Farm, construction, and production workers cannot.
Second, If assumed that all jobs same number working hours, the 37 percent of US jobs that can plausibly be performed at home account for 46 percent of all wages. Meaning, workers in jobs that can be performed at home typically earn more.
The above diagram plots the share of jobs that can be done at home against its median hourly wage.
Third, More than 45 percent of jobs in San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington, DC can be performed at home, whereas 30 percent or less of the jobs can be done at home in Fort Myers, Grand Rapids, and Las Vegas.
Results for countries other than United States
To study other economies they used the US data as a metric to assesses the ability to perform a particular occupation from home. And the income measure they used is the GDP per capita in 2019 adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP).
The reserach revelead a similar picture like in the US. There is a positive relationship between income levels and the shares of jobs that can be done from home. In Mexico and Turkey fewer than 25 percent of jobs could be performed at home, whereas this share exceeds 40 percent in Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Conclusion
Identifying which jobs cannot be performed from home is useful as policymakers try to target social insurance payments to those that most need them. Likewise, the share of jobs that could be performed at home is an important input to predicting the economy’s performance during this or subsequent periods of social distancing.
An individual worker’s productivity may differ considerably when working at home rather than her usual workplace.
Extra Data
https://brentneiman.com/research/DN.pdf