IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/spa/wpaper/2026wpecon31.html

Home (not so) sweet home: remote work and medical leaves in Brazil

Author

Listed:
  • Andre Mancha

  • Elisa Peres

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented shift to remote work worldwide. In this paper, we investigate the dual impact of this transition on physical injuries and mental health issues by analyzing more than 1.5 million medical leaves in Brazil from 2018 to 2021. Using a differences-in-differences model, we compared workers from firms who transitioned to remote work (non-essential services) and those who stayed commuting to their workplace (essential services) before and after the pandemic. Our findings reveal a significant decrease in labor accidents, primarily driven by fewer bod-ily injuries, but a substantial increase in medical leave related to mental health issues. The abrupt transition to remote work, combined with increased domestic responsibilities in a setting of social distancing norms, likely contributed to elevated stress levels and work-life conflicts. Our findings highlight the contrasting health impacts of remote work adoption in the context of an abrupt transition, with persistent mental health consequences that extend well beyond the initial pandemic shock.

Suggested Citation

  • Andre Mancha & Elisa Peres, 2026. "Home (not so) sweet home: remote work and medical leaves in Brazil," Working Papers, Department of Economics 2026_31, University of São Paulo (FEA-USP).
    • Handle: RePEc:spa:wpaper:2026wpecon31
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.repec.eae.fea.usp.br/documentos/Mancha_Peres_31WP.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • D04 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Policy: Formulation; Implementation; Evaluation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spa:wpaper:2026wpecon31. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Pedro Garcia Duarte The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Pedro Garcia Duarte to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deuspbr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.