Sarra Ben Yahmed

Remote Work and Digitalisation

Sarra Ben Yahmed is looking forward to exchanging with CESifo researchers on the topics of remote work and digitalisation. She will present a recent paper entitled “Flexible at work, flexible at home: working from home and the division of labour within families,” co-authored with Chiara Malavasi. Exploiting exogenous variation in working from home feasibility and in the timing of school closures across German States during the COVID-19 pandemic, they study under what conditions remote work may benefit gender equality within couples. In the event of small shocks to the household time constraint, due to light restrictions on school attendance, more childcare is reallocated to the parent whose job is more amenable to remote working. The results suggest that the rise in remote work may help the division of childcare to become more equal only if the father is the only one able to work from home, which corresponds to a small share of households in Germany.

Ms. Ben Yahmed’s current research agenda includes projects on how digitalisation and new work arrangements, such as working from home, affect employment, job mobility and gender equality. She received a research grant by the German Science Foundation (DFG) to work on “Regional Economic Disparities in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Outbreak: the role of Digitalization and Working-from-home”. She is also preparing for the upcoming launch of a new large-scale project on remote work funded by a Horizon grant of the European Commission.

Sarra Ben Yahmed is a Senior Researcher at ZEW, Mannheim, and works in the Research Unit “Labour Markets and Social Insurance”. Her research covers the fields of Labour Economics, International Trade, and Development Economics. She studies how transformations in the world of work affect inequalities in the labour market in both developed and developing countries. Sarra Ben Yahmed holds a PhD from Aix-Marseille University and received the Doctoral Thesis Prize from this institution in 2013. Prior joining ZEW in 2014, she worked at the Department of Economics of Sciences Po Paris and visited the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford.