Abstract

Since the beginning of the Corona pandemic, working from home has become much more accepted and important (Grunau/Haas 2021; Bellmann et al. 2021). This has far-reaching implications for occupational commuting and thus for the spatial structure of the labor market (Irlacher/Koch 2021). Mo-bile working reduces the need for daily presence at work and thus lowers the costs of the distance between home and place of work (in terms of monetary costs, stress burden, and the opportunity costs of travel time). Initial research using IAB process data from 2021 shows that the mean distance between home and place of work has indeed increased for job entrants compared to the years before 2020.The potential increase in the distance between home and place of work, on the one hand, increases the utility of individuals and, in the medium term, allows them to align their choice of job and home even better with their preferences and skills. In addition, this issue also has macroeconomic significance. If job seekers and firms each increase their search radius, then the likelihood of filling a vacancy increases and, on average, so does the quality of the resulting match (Dauth et al. 2022). In recent years, there have been a large number of studies on the new practice of working from home.