ESRI Discussion Paper Series No.379 Time Allocation and Declining Work From Home in Offshoring: Evidence from Japan, 1976-2016

This paper investigates how work from home (WFH) affects time use for work, housework, leisure, and sleep in daily life. Our focus is WFH without using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), that is, handiwork or home-based subcontracting for manufacturing firms (so-called old WFH). We use long-run worker-level time-use data for Japan, from 1976 to 2016. Since such labor-intensive handiwork has declined, due to globalization and automation, old WFH has declined. WFH females tend to reduce their working hours and spend more time on housework, while WFH males tend to devote more time to leisure. There are significant impacts of old WFH on the flexibility in time allocation in the 1990–2000s, but the impact disappears in the 2010s.