Experimental Design
We will use a Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI) technique. The participants in our study will be owners of a company, managers, directors or HR employees that decide on hiring policy. We will restrict the sample to individuals who, in the last 12 months, hired at least one employee in the occupation that could be potentially done from home (occupations according to the major groups of the International Standard Classification of Occupations from 2008 – ISCO-08: managers (ISCO 1), professionals (except for health professionals, ISCO 2), technicians and associate professionals (except for health associate professionals, ISCO 3), clerical support workers (ISCO 4), and service and sales workers (ISCO 5).
In the first part of the survey, we will collect basic information about the participants’ socio-demographic characteristics and the characteristics of their company (sector, ownership, size, and the possibility to work from home before, during and after COVID). We will also ask respondents about their opinion on how the company was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, how they assess the productivity of employees who work from home, and what is their subjective opinion regarding the threat associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. To investigate the quality of management practices in a company, we will ask six questions adapted from the World Management Survey’s module on the quality of hiring policies and talent management.
In the second part of the survey, we will introduce a discrete choice framework and ask all participants to state their preferences regarding hypothetical candidates.To assess firms’ demand for working from home, the participants will be shown five screens with vignettes. On each screen, there will be two job candidates. Each candidate will have eight attributes: gender, age, work experience in a similar position, commuting time to the office, occupation, working hours, willingness to work from home, and wage expectations. Each pair of candidates will vary in terms of two attributes: the ability to work from home and the wages. Candidate A will want to work from the office, while Candidate B will want to work from home either five days a week or 2-3 days a week (with equal probability). The number of days candidate B would work from home will be selected randomly. The wage expectation of Candidate A will equal the average wage in a given occupation. The wage expectation of Candidate B will be randomised (uniform distribution) in the range of {-24%,-20%,-16%,…,0,…,16%,20%,24%} deviations from the wage of Candidate A.