The effects of commuting and working from home arrangements on mental health

Abstract

In this study, we quantify the effects of commuting time and working from home (WFH) arrangements on the mental health of Australian men and women. Leveraging rich panel-data models together with home-job-spell fixed effects, we first show that adverse effects of commuting time are modest in magnitude and manifest only among men with poor levels of mental health (0.01 SD decrease per 10-min increase of commuting time). Second, we show that WFH arrangements have large positive effects on women's mental health, provided that the WFH component is large enough. The effects are once again concentrated among individuals with poor levels of mental health (0.2 SD increase corresponding to working fr..