“Globally, if both members of a couple work from home at least one day a week, you see they have a third of a child extra. In the US, that's almost half a child extra. These are really huge effects.”
Freakonomics Radio · Ideas & Essays · November 2026
Context
Bloom reports what his team found in surveys across 40 countries on remote work and fertility. He later notes that the causation could run the other way, since people who want kids may look for remote jobs.
Transcript
…40 countries on levels of work from home. And you kind of think while you're at it, while you're running these surveys, you might as well collect some other data. And one of the natural things is how many kids have you had? Do you have any kids now? Do you have plans to have kids in the future?
Okay, so tell us what you found.
Globally, if both members of a couple work from home at least one day a week, you see they have a third of a child extra. In the US, that's almost half a child extra. These are really huge effects. Given the US baseline fertility rate is 1.7, if you take a couple that are both going to the office five days a week and now they're both, say, working from home two days a week, we're predicting they would have something like 2.2 kids rather than 1.7.
State the parameters again of how much both parents need to be working from home for that number.
It turns out it's roughly 50% for each one. It's pretty even on men and women. Our sample is roughly 50%, men, 50%. Women, we're only looking at opposite-sex couples.
What happens if only one parent is working from home regularly?
More from Freakonomics Radio
