Working from home appears to go hand in hand with having more children. Across 38 countries, lifetime fertility was 0.32 children per woman higher when both partners worked from home at least one day a week than when neither did, a gap of 14%.
The study is by Steven J. Davis (Stanford University and the Hoover Institution), Cevat Giray Aksoy (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and King’s College London), Jose Maria Barrero (ITAM Business School), Nicholas Bloom and Katelyn Cranney (Stanford), Mathias Dolls (ifo Institute) and Pablo Zarate (Princeton). It was issued as NBER Working Paper 34963 in March 2026.
Two big surveys of working life
The main data come from two surveys the authors run. The Global Survey of Working Arrangements covers 38 countries; its fourth wave, fielded from November 2024 to February 2025, added a fertility module and started from 25,076 respondents. The U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes adds 89,886 observations on people aged 20 to 45, collected from December 2022 to December 2025.
The authors looked at respondents aged 20 to 45 and three measures: births from 2023 to early 2025, including pregnancies; plans for future children; and lifetime fertility, meaning children already born plus those planned.
People who worked from home at least one day a week scored higher on all three. The pattern held after controlling for age, education, marital status, existing children, both partners’ employment and country or state, and it held for men and women separately.
The biggest gap is when both partners stay home
For couples, fertility was highest when both partners worked from home. In the 38-country data, that meant 0.32 more children per woman. In the U.S. survey the gap was larger, at 0.45 children, or 18%.
Because families with children may simply seek out remote jobs, the authors added a second test. Using the U.S. Current Population Survey for people aged 30 to 45, they measured how common remote work is in each person’s occupation, using a language model applied to a near-universe of U.S. job postings.
One-year fertility rose with these remote-work opportunities, both in 2017 to 2019 and in 2023 to 2025. For women with partners after the pandemic, a one standard deviation rise in remote-work share in both partners’ occupations raised one-year fertility by an estimated 14% of the average.
The authors say they cannot fully rule out selection, but find it implausible as the whole story, since most people have settled into an occupation by 30 and no one chose a career before 2020 knowing remote work would boom.
Interpreted causally, their estimates imply remote work accounts for 8.1% of U.S. fertility, about 291,000 births in 2024. Raising remote work to the average level of Canada, the UK and the US would lift fertility by about 4% to 5% in Japan and South Korea, they estimate.
Study Details:
- Title: Work from Home and Fertility
- Authors: Steven J. Davis, Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Katelyn Cranney, Mathias Dolls, Pablo Zarate
- Journal: NBER Working Paper No. 34963
- Publication Date: March 2026
- DOI: 10.3386/w34963