Escaping from home: where do academics perform their research work during Covid-19 pandemic?

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced most workers to work from home (WFH). At a first glance, this seems not a big change for academics, who, even in normal time, are used to performing their research activities autonomously and to balancing on-campus and off-campus locations. Instead, exactly for their flexible habits it is interesting to study where academics have worked during the Covid-19 pandemic and which factors relate to their location choices. This paper addresses these issues by relying on survey data from a sample of 7,865 Italian tenured academics. First, cluster analysis unveils four main location choices of Italian academics during the Covid-19 pandemic depending on the frequency of access to home, university or other spaces, namely Home-centric, University-centric, Between home and university and Multi-located. Second, multinomial probit models reveal a nuanced picture of the factors associated to the belonging to each cluster. Decisions over location choice depend, mostly, on work-related factors (i.e., discipline); then on space-related factors (i.e., satisfaction towards campus workspace characteristics and the need of a laboratory); finally, on, life-related factors (i.e., living with school children or a partner) and other factors (i.e., commuting times and gender). However, each of the four location patterns depend on different determinants. The results offer university and practice-wide implications anticipating future changes in how work in academia is spatially organized.