Tag: working from home

Research Suggests People Who Work From Home Are Having More Babies

Posted on by Lone Candle

“”Flexibility at work has the power to drive fertility decisions,” according to researchers running a survey in the U.S. and 38 other countries.

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People who worked from home at least one day per week “had more biological children from 2021 to early 2025, and plan to have more children in the future, compared to observationally similar persons who do not” work from home, according to the August 2025 working paper, “Work from Home and Fertility.”

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Researchers say working from home may make it easier to balance work and family, but note that “it’s also plausible that parents with young children at home may select” work-from-home arrangements more often.

Self-selection seems less of a confounding factor when it comes to future fertility intentions. In both the U.S. and multicountry samples, and for both men and women, working from home at least one day per week increased their preferred number of kids. For women, having a partner who occasionally worked from home was also associated with a desire for more children.

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A study out of Norway published in the December 2025 edition of Labour Economics found the country saw “a significant and persistent” 10 percent increase in births beginning nine months after the first COVID-19 lockdowns started. These “fertility increases were concentrated among women in ‘greedy jobs’ with lower flexibility prior to lockdown,” according to the paper. “The overall birth response was driven by women who retained their job during the lockdown period, consistent with changes in the nature of work (flexibility) being a key mechanism,” rather than increased time due to job loss.

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It also calls into question the wisdom of a professedly pronatalist presidential administration ordering all federal employees to return to the office, as President Donald Trump did in early 2025. Simplifying remote work for both public and private sector employees could be a quicker, cheaper path to more children.”

https://reason.com/2025/12/28/work-from-home-have-more-kids/

Remote Work Is Here to Stay and That’s a Good Thing

Posted on by Lone Candle

“It’s looking more and more like there’s no reason for some of us to change out of pajamas; the evidence suggests that remote work has been a boon for many people and is here to stay. That has big implications for expanding people’s choices about where they live and why. But it may also widen the divide between those can work where they live and those who must live where they work.

“More than 20 percent of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office,” the U.S.-based consulting firm McKinsey & Company reported in November of an analysis of the workforces in nine countries (China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States). “If remote work took hold at that level, that would mean three to four times as many people working from home than before the pandemic and would have a profound impact on urban economies, transportation, and consumer spending, among other things.”

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute (BFI) agree that remote work has gained a larger permanent presence in our lives.

“Our survey evidence says that 22 percent of all full work days will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before,” Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis report in a working paper based on data drawn from 15,000 Americans.”