Aug 13, 2024
Project on the health effects of working from home
In the course of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there was an unexpected increase in the proportion of people working from home, which remained at a high level even in the post-pandemic phase. A recently launched interdisciplinary research project is now investigating the causal effect of working from home on individual health and thus indirectly on employee productivity.
In their joint research, Prof. Dr. Christian Leßmann, Prof. Dr. Kamila Cygan-Rehm, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Valentin Lindlacher and Katharina Bettig are using the sharp increase in working from home in Germany in March 2020 as a natural experiment to investigate its long-term effects on physical and mental health. They are using data on the pre-pandemic variation in the home office potential of different occupations and industries and linking this with individual health and socio-economic data from BARMER health insurance with more than 5 million insured persons. Survey data will also be collected. Initial results show that a person's ability to work from home in the pre-pandemic period strongly predicts actual home office use during and after the pandemic. Subsequently, a difference-in-difference design will be used to compare the health effects of people in occupations with high and low home office potential.
Project duration: 2024-2027
Project partners:
- TU Dresden (Prof. Dr. Christian Leßmann, Prof. Dr. Kamila Cygan-Rehm,
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Valentin Lindlacher, and Katharina Bettig) - ifo Institute (Dr. Jean-Victor Alipour)
- BARMER Institute for Health Systems Research (bifg)
Contact for press inquiries:
Prof. Dr. Christian Leßmann
Chair of Economics, in particular International Economic Relations
Phone: +49 351 463-32172