Is remote working a privilege? A spatial Durbin approach of digital infrastructure and workplace mobility change during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.

57 Pages Posted: 3 Aug 2021

See all articles by Ryan Y. Wang

Ryan Y. Wang

Pennsylvania State University, College of Communications, Students

Date Written: August 3, 2021

Abstract

Utilizing workplace mobility change from Google Community Mobility Report as a proxy for the availability of remote working, the present study aims at (1) testing the spatial dependence of workplace mobility change of U.S. county during the COVID-19 outbreak; (2) examining the impact of ICTs access on the workplace mobility change; (3) investigating the spillover effect of ICTs access from adjacent counties on workplace mobility change (N = 1027). Based on the result of the global measure of spatial dependence, this study identifies the spatial pattern of workplace mobility across the contiguous U.S., and the spatial pattern is consistent across time from March to December 2020. Besides, after controlling for democratic and occupation factors, the results of the spatial Durbin error models find that if a county with better digital infrastructure (i.e., more devices, more available and faster Internet connection), the people in the county tends to have the option to shift to remote working during the pandemic, and their workplace mobility change would be larger comparing to the baseline of pre-pandemic period. And this finding is constantly detected across 10 months in 2020, which illustrates that the ICTs access is an inevitably important determinant for the availability of remote working during the pandemic. More interestingly, the results also detect a spillover effect of the ICT access from adjacent counties. Therefore, ICTs access is an important factor affecting the availability of remote working during the pandemic. And the effect is not only situated in people’s current location, but also spilled from adjacent geographical locations. In other words, remote working could be a privilege for those households and individuals with access to better digital infrastructure.

Keywords: remote working; workplace mobility; digital infrastructure; spatial Durbin error model; COVID-19 pandemic

Suggested Citation

Wang, Ryan, Is remote working a privilege? A spatial Durbin approach of digital infrastructure and workplace mobility change during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. (August 3, 2021). TPRC49: The 49th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3898272 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3898272

Ryan Wang (Contact Author)

Pennsylvania State University, College of Communications, Students ( email )

92 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14526
United States

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