Determinants of work location choice in academia

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most workers to work from home (WFH). At first glance, this seems not to be a significant change for academics, who, even in regular times, are used to performing their research activities autonomously and balancing on-campus and off-campus locations. Instead, precisely because of their flexible habits, it is interesting to study where academics worked during the COVID-19 pandemic and which factors relate to their location choices. This paper addresses these issues using survey data from 7,865 Italian-tenured academics. First, cluster analysis unveils four main location choices of Italian academics during the COVID-19 pandemic depending on the frequency of access to home, university, or other spaces, namely Home-centric, University-centric, Between home and university, and Multi-located. Second, multinomial probit models reveal a nuanced picture of the factors associated with belonging to each cluster. Decisions over location choice depend mainly on work-related factors (i.e., discipline), then on space-related factors (i.e., satisfaction towards campus workspace characteristics and the need for a laboratory), finally, on, life-related factors (i.e., living with school children or a partner) and other factors (i.e., commuting times and gender). However, each of the four location patterns depends on different determinants. The results offer university and practice-wide implications anticipating future changes in how work in academia is spatially organized.