Alessandra Fenizia and Tom Kirchmaier. 25 September 2024. Paper Number CEPDP2036 Download PDF – Not incentivized yet efficient: Working from home in the public sector

This paper studies whether working from home (WFH) affects workers’ performance in public sector jobs. Studying public sector initiatives allows us to establish baseline estimates on the impact of WFH net of incentives. Exploiting novel administrative data and plausibly exogenous variation in work location, we find that WFH increases productivity by 12%. These productivity gains are primarily driven by reduced distractions. They are not explained by differences in quality, shift length, or task allocation. The productivity gains more than double when tasks are assigned by the supervisor.