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AIEL 2026


41st Conference of the Italian Association of Labour Economics

Department of Law
Roma Tre University 

Rome, 17-19 September 2026 

The Price of Presence: How Much Workers Value Remote Work


Presenter

Omar Bamieh (Universidad Andrés Bello)


Coauthors

Lennart Ziegler


Abstract

Using a revealed preference approach applied to administrative linked employer-employee data from Austria—which uniquely combine employment and wage records with information on the annual number of days each worker spent working from home—we quantify the value workers place on remote work as a non-wage amenity. Voluntary job transitions imply that workers would accept a 0.036 percent wage reduction for a 1 percent increase in annual work-from-home (WFH) days, and a 22 percent wage reduction for having access to any remote work at all. A compensating variation analysis, which integrates over the full gap between actual and preferred annual WFH days for all workers, implies an average welfare cost of about 15 percent of wages.