Working-From-Home and Contact-Intensive Jobs in Uruguay∗ Rafael Guntiny New York University First draft: 6th April 2020 Current draft: 2nd December 2020 Abstract I apply the methodology of Dingel and Neiman (2020), and Mongey, Pilossoph, and Weinberg (2020) to identify which jobs can be performed at home (WFH) and are performed in close physical contact to others (CI) in Uruguay. My baseline es- timates show that around 78% of the workers can’t WFH and 22% have CI. Using data on the characteristics of households I find large heterogeneity in the share of worker that WFH and have CI across the income distribution, geographical loca- tions, age groups, education levels, and production sectors. In addition, I study the relation of WFH and CI with the access to social insurance, hand-to-mouth propen- sity, intra-household insurance and job-automation risk. Finally, I show that my baseline estimates of WFH are consistent with ex-post survey estimations during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. ∗All errors are my own. Thanks to Ana Balsa, Lucia Casal, Federico Ganz, Juan Dubra, Gonzalo Varela, Rafael Xavier and participants in the Universidad of Montevideo economics seminar. Thanks to the the Faculty of Social Sciences of UdelaR that provide me access to data from the EFHU. Codes and data are publicly available, except for the data originally with restricted access. Comments welcome. yEmail:
[email protected] 1 1 Introduction As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic governments and individuals quickly adopted policies and changed their behavior in order the reduce the spread of the virus.1 Uruguay was no exception.