Teleworking and remote schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a very large increase in teleworking. In addition, school closings led to a large number of students attending school remotely. A supplement survey to the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, conducted in the spring of 2021, makes it possible to examine the relationship between these two occurrences. My findings indicate that remote schooling by a parent’s child led to a sizable increase in the likelihood of working at home of 10 hours or more. The responsiveness of teleworking to remote schooling depended crucially on how suitable an individual’s job was to teleworking. Remote schooling had a quite substantial effect on the likelihood of teleworking for jobs that were well suited for teleworking and no effect for jobs that were poorly suited.