THE PROPENSITY TO WORK FROM HOME

1. THE PROPENSITY TO WORK FROM HOME Joshua Drucker Asad J. Khattak Department of City and Regional Planning University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2. The Importance of the Home-Work Phenomenon • Increasing frequency of and interest in telecommuting • Numerous potential benefits to workers, employers, transportation system, and natural environment • Assessment and prediction of rates of adoption and magnitude of impacts needed

3. Literature Working from home is generally associated with: • larger families, small children • higher income levels • control over job tasks and scheduling • familiarity with other telecommuters • longer commute times

4. Literature, continued Mixed or inconclusive results: • age • gender • education • supervisory status • vehicle quantity • older children Shortcomings of existing studies: • Inconsistent conclusions • Small, restricted data samples

5. The 1995 NPTS • Telephone survey conducted over 14-month period • Sample included more than 42,000 households and 95,000 persons • Sophisticated stratification and weighting techniques yield a sample representative of nation • Oversampling in certain locations (e.g., large cities, census blocks near transit)

6. NPTS Features Advantages: • close to revealed preferences • unambiguous answer schema • long sampling time frame • large, representative data set • many individual and locational characteristics surveyed Disadvantages: • lacks certain types of information, e.g., occupational characteristics • does not address telecommuting directly

7. Methodology - Conceptual Structure The analysis is conducted by discrete-value regression • dependent variable is frequency of working from home • 23 independent variables Data set restricted to • MSAs with 1 million residents • respondents 16 years or older

8. Methodology - Variables Dependent variable organized into 3 frequency categories: • never work from home • infrequent ( < once per week) • frequent (  once per week) 23 independent variables • personal characteristics • location and accessibility

9. Methodology - Model Structure • Ordered (probit and logit) and unordered (multinomial logit) response models used to estimate frequency of working from home • each model significant • yields estimators and marginal effects • results of the 3 models similar • only probit results shown here • Selection model (binary probit) used to separate working and non-working respondents, accounting for sample selection bias

10. Selected Results

11. More Selected Results

12. Prediction Implications • Extension of previous research to nationally representative sample • forecasting • transportation and other planning • Largest impacts from • level of education • employment status • Other significant influences from • small children in family • gender • age • household income

13. Policy Implications • Largest impacts on home-work rates will come from policies that increase education levels and the proportion of high-end jobs • Parking charges are directly policy-sensitive and have a substantial influence • Employers interested in encouraging telecommuting and working from home may wish to target employees with • high education levels • multiple vehicles • part-time status

14. Directions for Further Research • Large constant term indicates need for additional variables to fully understand influences • organizational and occupational variables unavailable from NPTS • other individual and locational characteristics • Additional research to incorporate further data categories and sampling characteristics • compare to the results of this and other analyses • focus on factors conducive to policy intervention