Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/273468 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
ZEW Discussion Papers No. 23-018
Publisher: 
ZEW - Leibniz-Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung, Mannheim
Abstract: 
The recent shift towards working from home (WFH) has far-reaching implications for social and economic outcomes. While firms are gatekeepers for the ongoing diffusion of flexible work arrangements, there is little evidence on how firms decide to offer WFH. We leverage two survey experiments among nearly 800 knowledge-intensive services firms in Germany to analyse whether managers' beliefs about the productivity effects of WFH affect their adoption decisions. Exploiting exogenous variation in managers' information set, we find that managers update their beliefs about the productivity effects of WFH when they receive information on workers' self-assessed WFH productivity. In addition, the information treatment significantly increases managers' willingness to adopt or intensify WFH policies. Combining our main survey experiment with two follow-up surveys, we find persistent information treatment effects on both managers' beliefs about WFH productivity and firms' expected WFH intensity after the Covid-19 pandemic. A complementary survey experiment confirms our results pointing to a causal relationship between managers' beliefs about WFH productivity and the adoption of WFH practices. These findings have implications for potential policy measures targeting firms' WFH adoption.
Subjects: 
working from home
survey experiment
information provision
firm-level
managers
expectations
JEL: 
D22
D23
L22
O33
M54
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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