Home, sweet home? The impact of working from home on the division of unpaid work during the COVID-19 lockdown.

ABSTRACT: A lockdown implies a shift from the public to the private sphere, and from market to non-market production, thereby increasing the volume of unpaid work. Already before the pandemic, unpaid work was disproportionately borne by women. This paper studies the effect of working from home for pay (WFH), due to a lockdown, on the change in the division of housework and childcare within couple households. While previous studies on the effect of WFH on the reconciliation of work and family life and the division of labour within the household suffered from selection bias, we are able to identify this effect by drawing upon the shock of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Austria. The corresponding legal measures left little choice over WFH. In any case, WFH is exogenous, conditional on a small set of in

SUBMITTER: Derndorfer J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8575241 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature