A Tale of Hours Worked for Pay from Home Before and after the Great Recession : Learning from High-Frequency Diaries

About one in ten Americans were bringing some work home around the years of the Great Recession, according to our estimates. Here we study how work from home responded to the large upswings in unemployment rates during the Great Recession and the consequent expansions and reductions in the generosity of unemployment benefits, which were first increased in duration from 26 weeks up to 99 weeks, and later reduced back to 26 weeks, as the recession resumed. Workers may bring work home to increase work intensity for fears of job loss while job seekers’ reservation wages likely differ for remote work, also depending on the level of unemployment and the duration of unemployment benefits. We exploit for identification purposes the large variations across states in timing and generosity of expansions and reductions in unemployment benefit durations, examining over 150,000 daily activity diaries from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), merged with data on state monthly unemployment rates and beginning/end dates of state Extended Benefits (EB). We find that women, but not men, increased work done both from the workplace and from home, as well as commuting, in response to EB reductions