Flexible working and well-being: evidence from the UK

Publication type

Journal Article

Author

Publication date

December 3, 2024

Summary:

Recent technological advancements have facilitated alternative work arrangements. This paper investigates how flextime and working from home (WfH) relate to workers’ well-being using longitudinal data drawn from the Understanding Society study for the UK. It accounts for individual, job, and family characteristics while controlling for individual fixed effects. Additionally, it employs the Oster test to examine the potential influence of unobserved variables. Results show that men experience improved job satisfaction and mental health with flextime arrangements, while women predominantly benefit in terms of job satisfaction. Additionally, women adopting remote work report heightened satisfaction with job and life, and better mental health, whereas men primarily report greater job satisfaction. Interestingly, flextime effects are stronger for men, while WfH is more beneficial for women. Some heterogeneous effects are also found by parental status, age, and income groups.

Published in

Journal of Demographic Economics

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2024.16

ISSN

20540892

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with Université catholique de Louvain

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re- use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Online Early

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