How and why work-from-home rates differ across countries and people

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated the shift to work from home around the world, but with significant cross-country variations. This column explores how factors such as lockdown stringency, population density, and individualism affected the adoption of working from home across 34 countries. Individualism has the strongest association with work from home, followed by lockdown stringency and population-weighted density. Lockdown stringency and population-weighted density yield statistically significant estimates only for women. In the US, local population density has the greatest effect on work from home.