COVID-19 Mobility Restrictions and Post-Pandemic Work from Home

Did more restrictive mobility policies during the COVID-19 pandemic have lasting impacts on work from home? I argue that changes experienced during the pandemic regarding several work from home arrangements (for example, from school closures and social distancing policies) in states with more strict mobility policies may have become more entrenched for those workers compared to individuals living in states that had more lax restrictions. I examine work from home percentages reported in the annual US Census American Community Survey (ACS) pre and post COVID-19 pandemic to explore whether there were lasting impacts on work from home in states that had more stringent mobility restriction policies versus states with more lax mobility policies during the pandemic. The ACS is the largest US Household survey in the US, with an annual sample size of about 3.5 million addresses. Results from a difference-in-difference estimation show a significant increase in the percentage of workers working from home post COVID-19 in states that had more stringent mobility restrictions than states that had more lax mobility restrictions. The results also show a significant increase in the percentage of workers working from home in states that had longer duration COVID-19 mobility restriction policies compared to other states that had more lax mobility restrictions. These results suggest that workers in more strict mobility policy states became more entrenched with their work from arrangements and that COVID-19 public health policies had lasting effects on remote work trends in the US. Overall, this paper explores how public health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic influenced remote work trends in the US.