A study covering 38 countries by the German economic think-tank ifo Institut in co-operation with Stanford University shows couples who work from home are more likely to have children.
According to the study, one day of home office working per week increases the fertility rate by 14 per cent on average – meaning that one in three women would have one extra child compared to people who cannot work from home.
If both partners work from home at least one day a week, the fertility rate rises by 18 per cent.
Ifo researcher Mathias Doll said yesterday: “Our results indicate that a broader access to remote work increases the number of children – probably because it reduces the temporal and organisational cost of combining job and family life.”
The researchers believe that the effect of home office working on fertility may become greater as it was only introduced widely during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 onwards:
“Individual attitudes and social norms related to fertility, child rearing, work-life balance, and household responsibilities can be sticky and adjust slowly to the recent rise of working from home. Thus, the fertility consequences of working from home may have yet to peak,” they write.
The study – tilted Work from Home and Fertility – was published yesterday as a working paper.
For their research, the seven authors drew on data from the Global Survey of Working Arrangements. That is a large-scale international survey project started in 2021 which aims to measure practices, perceptions and constraints related to working from home.
All in all, the study used survey data on 100,000 individuals, primarily aged between 20 and 45, from 38 countries.
The researchers believe that adopting practices from other countries may serve to raise Germany’s declining fertility rate.
Doll said: “If we raise the home office quota to the level prevalent in the US, this could lead to an additional 13,500 births in Germany annually.
“More home office cannot solve the demographic problem, but it can be a building block to dampen the trend of declining fertility rates.”
In 2024, an average German woman had 1.35 children, according to the Federal Office of Statistics – a 2 per cent decline compared to the previous year. In total, 677,000 babies were born in Germany that year.
In the European Union as a whole, the average fertility rate was 1.34 children per woman in 2024, according to Eurostat, ranging from 1.72 in Bulgaria to just 1.01 children in Malta.
