Influence of telecommuting on out-of-home time use and diversity of locations visited: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unforeseen changes in travel and activity behavior, most notably the wide adoption of telecommuting across various sectors of the workforce. This paper investigates the impact of telecommuting on time use and the number of unique locations visited, both of which have been shown to be closely linked to well-being. Previous telecommuting research often relies on cross-sectional data for which it is difficult to control for unobserved confounding, only analyzes impacts of time-use at the daily level, and has yet to quantify the impact of telecommuting on diversity of locations visited. We use quasi-experimental designs to control for unobserved confounders and extend previous research to identify whether the daily impacts of telecommuting on time-use are additive or substitutional at the weekly level. We use passively collected Point of Interest (POI) data between January 2020 and September 2022, supplemented by five waves of survey responses throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (August 2020, October 2020, December 2020, April 2021, and July 2021) from a panel of U.S. smartphone users. We find that on telecommuting days, workers spend significantly more time at out-of-home non-work locations, estimated to be 114 min prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, decreasing in the early stages of the pandemic to 63 min, and recovering to approximately 120 min in 2022, estimates that are within the range of estimates presented in previous literature. While existing literature focuses on single day analyses, our weekly analysis suggests that daily differences due to telecommuting are substitutional, with the effect of an additional day of telecommuting on time-use at the weekly level being null. Our extension to analyze the impacts of telecommuting on the number of unique locations visited shows that an additional day of telecommuting results in an average decrease of 0.35 in the number of unique weekly locations visited. Collectively, our findings suggest that while telecommuting does not diminish the overall weekly time spent at out-of-home non-work locations, it decreases the diversity of such locations on a weekly level.