Home Safe Home: Safety Gains Through Telework During the Covid‐19 Pandemic

This paper exploits exogenous shifts in work organisation during the Covid‐19 pandemic to study the implications of hybrid and remote work arrangements on occupational safety. Combining accident registers and household survey microdata from Hungary, we are able to address potential selection and reporting bias, and reliably identify the relevant mechanisms at play. Three novel findings emerge from our study. First, the pandemic had a strong positive effect on work safety: the number and equivalised incidence of work‐related accidents decreased by 16% and 11% on average. Second, these gains were unevenly distributed: workers in relatively safe occupations experienced larger reductions in accident hazards, further amplifying existing inequalities in the labour market. Third, the rapid expansion of telework was the main driver of these changes, operating mainly through compositional shifts from high‐risk traditional to low‐risk remote work arrangements within jobs. Remarkably, the safety benefits of telework did not emerge from more secure work organisation in the home but through foregone injuries typically sustained during ancillary work‐related activities such as lunch breaks, mobility routines and other errands around the workplace. Taken together, these results suggest that hybrid and remote work arrangements can be effective tools to promote occupational health and safety, though further research is needed to fully understand the broader externalities involved.