The effect of working from home on major time allocations with a focus on food-related activities
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The effect of working from home on major time allocations with a focus on food-related activities Brandon J. Restrepo
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Eliana Zeballos2
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Received: 13 February 2020 / Accepted: 11 August 2020 © This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may applye 2020
Abstract Telecommuting has been on the rise in the U.S. and working from home may affect how workers allocate their time over the course of a day. In this paper, using a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) framework, we examine differences in time spent in major activities between individuals who worked from home and away from home. We use data on prime working-age adults (age 25–54 years old) who participated in the 2017–18 Leave and Job Flexibilities Module of the American Time Use Survey. Results show that prime working-age American adults who worked from home during their diary day spent less time working and on personal care, but more time on leisure, sleeping, and on food production and consumption than those who worked away from home. For instance, among individuals with a spouse or partner present, those who worked from home spent 25 more minutes engaged in food production and 48 more minutes eating and drinking at home than did individuals who worked away from home, which are large relative to the sample averages of 33 and 31 min, respectively. These results show that there is important variation in the daily time allocation of workers in their prime working years and suggest in particular that working from home may allow for substantially more time to produce food and consume food at home, which may provide teleworkers with health benefits since home-produced meals tend to be lower in calories and higher in nutrients than meals prepared away from home. Keywords Time use Work from home Telework Work Food production Eating and drinking at home ●
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JEL Codes D13 I12 J22 ●
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* Brandon J. Restrepo [email protected] 1
USDA Economic Research Service, Food Economic Division, Kansas City, MO, USA
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USDA Economic Research Service, Food Economic Division, Washington, DC, USA
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B. J. Restrepo, E. Zeballos
1 Introduction In the U.S., the first confirmed case of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) occurred on January 19, 2020 (Holshue et al. 2020) and since then, COVID-19 has spread to every state in the nation. On March 16, 2020, to slow the spread of COVID-19, the federal government announced federal social distancing guidelines (“15 Days to Slow the Spread”) and many U.S. jurisdictions followed with implementation of stay-at-home orders. As a result, many American workers are performing their jobs from home. According to Gallup Panel data, the percentage of U.S. workers who said they had worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic doubled from 31 percent in mid-March to 62 percent in early April.1 The widespread and extraordinary state of affairs caused by the pandemic raises an important question: how does the daily time allocation of Americans who work from
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