The pandemic-era shift to working from home raised a question with broad demographic implications: if commuting time disappears and schedules become more flexible, do people have more children? New research by economist Andrew C. Johnston suggests the answer is not a simple yes—at least for one key group of Americans.
Johnston examined the rapid expansion of remote work in 2020 and tracked how birth rates changed among U.S. college graduates. Rather than classifying people by their jobs—an approach that can be distorted if workers switched occupations in response to the new labor market—he measured “exposure” to remote work through college major. Different fields of study tend to lead to careers with varying capacity for telework, and majors are largely chosen well before the pandemic. Using pre-pandemic differences in the “teleworkability” associated with those majors, Johnston compared birth outcomes before and after the remote-work surge.
The main finding runs counter to the popular idea that remote work should make it easier to start or expand a family. Among married women, moving one standard deviation higher in teleworkability was linked to a roughly 2% decline in annual birth rates. At the same time, full-time employment among married women rose by about 1.3% with higher teleworkability, suggesting that remote work may have increased labor supply more than it increased childbearing.
For other groups, the study did not detect clear fertility effects. Johnston reports no statistically significant changes in births among men or among unmarried women associated with teleworkability. He also finds no significant evidence that remote-work exposure shifted marriage or divorce patterns, implying the birth-rate changes among married women are not simply the byproduct of changes in partnering or marital stability.
To understand why births might fall when remote work rises, Johnston conducted accounting exercises to gauge possible mechanisms. These analyses indicate that increased employment could account for about half of the observed decline in births among married women. In other words, if remote work made full-time work more feasible or more attractive, the resulting increase in hours and attachment to the labor market may have competed with childbearing—at least in the short run captured by the study.
The research also speaks to what might happen if remote work receded. Johnston’s estimates imply that returning to pre-pandemic levels of telework could increase the total fertility rate by about 0.09 births per woman. While the number may appear modest, it is meaningful in the context of national fertility trends, where changes of a tenth of a birth per woman can matter for population growth and age structure.
Johnston credits numerous scholars for feedback and notes that the work was supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation. He also emphasizes that the conclusions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which disseminates research through working papers and multiple publications.
Why it matters
Remote work is often framed as a family-friendly policy, but these findings suggest it may also encourage greater full-time employment among married women in ways that can reduce births. Employers weighing return-to-office policies—and governments concerned about declining fertility—may want to track how telework affects both labor supply and family formation over longer time horizons. The next question is whether these effects persist as remote work becomes a stable feature of the economy rather than an emergency response.