Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The prevalence of telework (i.e., working outside the conventional workplace) has increased significantly in the United States over the past two decades (Mateyka et al., 2012). Data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation reveal that the number of people in the United States who worked from home at least 1 day per week increased from 9.2 million (7.0 percent of all workers) in 1997 to 13.4 million (9.5 percent of all workers) in 2010. The increase in telework was largest among workers who worked exclusively from home; 6.6 percent of all workers worked exclusively from home in 2010 relative to 4.8 percent of all workers in 1997.

This large shift in the labor force from conventional workplaces to remote environments is attributed in part to greater demand for workplace flexibility (Council of Economic Advisors, 2014b). Women comprise nearly 50 percent of the civilian labor force and 70.9 percent of mothers with children under age 18 work (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). As a result, all parents are working in more than 60 percent of households with children (Council of Economic Advisors, 2014a). Additionally, approximately 40 million Americans provide unpaid care for an elderly relative or friend and roughly two-thirds of those caregivers work (Council of Economic Advisors, 2014a).

While the prevalence of telework has increased and may provide working families with greater flexibility to balance work and family, there exists no study that measures the impact of telework on time use and work-life conflict. This paper fills that gap in the existing literature by exploring time use among teleworkers in the American Time Use Survey from 2003-2014. We use fractional regression methods to control for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics in the associations between working remotely at home and time spent caring for children, preparing meals, exercising, and other health-related behaviors. The results of this study provide new information about the potential benefits of workplace flexibility policies for working families in the United States.