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THE PROPENSITY TO WORK FROM HOME. Joshua Drucker Asad J. Khattak Department of City and Regional Planning University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Importance of the Home-Work Phenomenon. Increasing frequency of and interest in telecommuting
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THE PROPENSITY TO WORK FROM HOME Joshua Drucker Asad J. Khattak Department of City and Regional Planning University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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