Research

Abstract: Commuting is a fundamental aspect of employees’ daily routines and continues to evolve with technological advancements. Yet the effects of commuting on subjective well-being remain insufficiently investigated in the context of expanding digital connectivity. This paper examines the causal effects of changes in commuting distance on subjective well-being in an era of widespread mobile internet availability. Exploiting exogenous shifts in commuting distance resulting from employer-driven workplace relocations, we employ a Difference-in-Differences framework using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) from 2010 to 2019. Our results show that an involuntary increase in commuting distance reduces life satisfaction by 3 percent, on average, and heightens feelings of worry by almost 8 percent, on average. Our heterogeneity analysis shows that increased mobile coverage during commutes partially mitigates the decline in life satisfaction but exacerbates the negative impact on satisfaction with leisure. 

Abstract: Can working from home mitigate declining fertility in high-income countries? Using administrative health insurance records from one of Germany’s largest statutory health insurers, I study a sample of nearly 700,000 employed women aged 20–39 observed monthly from 2018 through 2024. I exploit the sudden and persistent increase in remote work—from fewer than 10% of employees before the COVID- 19 pandemic to more than 25% today as a natural experiment. In a difference-in-differences design, I compare fertility outcomes of women who, prior to the pandemic, held jobs with high WFH potential to those in jobs with low WFH potential, thus avoiding selection into treatment and focusing on post-pandemic outcomes. I show that an increase in WFH potential has no effect on the fertility of women of childbearing age, neither on births nor on the initiation of pregnancies. However, the aggregate null masks stark heterogeneity by age. For younger women (20-30 years), a 10-percent-point increase of WFH potential increases the annual probability of birth by 7% relative to the mean before treatment (3 additional births per 1,000 women per year). For older women (aged 31–39), the same increase reduces birth probability by 2.5 % (2 fewer births per 1,000 women per year). These opposing effects largely offset each other in the aggregate. Mechanism analyses reveal that the age-specific effects reflect deliberate fertility decisions rather than differential health effects: among younger women, procreative management counseling rises in tandem with births, indicating planned births; among older women, medical abortions increase significantly, suggesting an active choice against (additional) children. Descriptive evidence suggests that birth parity is a key driver—WFH facilitates entry into motherhood but discourages higher-order births. These findings carry a cautionary message: expanding remote work alone is unlikely to raise total fertility rates.

Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a sudden and lasting shift to work-from-home (WFH) in many occupations. However, we know very little about how WFH affects health-related absenteeism and health. In this paper, we use the sharp increase in WFH in Germany in March 2020 as a natural experiment to examine its short- and medium-term effects on sick leave take-up. Specifically, we exploit the pre-pandemic variation in WFH potential across occupations and link it to individual data on health care utilization and diagnoses between 2018 and 2023 from a large statutory health insurance fund. Combining event studies and a difference-in-difference design, we compare the sick leave taking of individuals who held jobs with different WFH potentials. We find that higher WFH potential persistently decreases sickness absence. The effect is driven by short-term sick leave due to minor infections and musculoskeletal problems such as back pain.