children while simultaneously generating income, particularly for households with internet access and in occupations amenable to remote work.

Heggeness and Suri (2021) study the impact of childcare responsibilities on mothers who telework in the United States. They compare how mothers’ labor force participation decreased relative to prime-age women without children and prime-age custodial fathers. They find that flexible work helps to increase women’s labor supply. As Baruch (2001) remarks in his paper, teleworking enlarges the employer’s labor market as more people can be hired (i.e. single parents, second earners with children, people who live in remote places, etc.). Moreover, in another quantitative study, Baruch (2001) found that teleworking was the only option to work for working mothers with young children at home. Chung and vad der Horst (2018) find that a flexible arrangement for women after childbirth helps them sustain their employment status.

In the same line, Berniel et al. (2021) use microdata from the World Bank’s high-frequency phone household survey data (HFPS) to analyze the factors that account for the asymmetric impact of the COVID19 in Latin America. They look at heterogeneities by occupations and construct potential work from home measures for each individual to estimate different labor outcomes. In line with prior studies, they find that the impact of the COVID-19 shock was harder for women, but the ability to work from home mitigated the adverse effect, particularly for women with children. A possible mechanism behind their results is that women in Latin American countries are more likely to be responsible for family and home care; therefore, they are more likely to stay at home to care for the children following school closures. Indeed, they also found evidence that women who were able to work from home were more likely to keep their jobs.

Concerning the effect of the internet on women’s labor force participation, Dettling (2017) finds a positive impact of high-speed internet use on the labor supply decisions of married women by about 4.1 percentage points. This conclusion does not hold for men or single women, for whom high-speed internet does not have an impact on their labor supply decisions.

Beyond the use of telework to refer to the decision of where and how to work; there is a much longer literature that considers to costs and benefits of participating in the labor market as the basis for women’s decision to work. For instance, Cogan (1981) analyzes the labor supply factors to explain the desired number of hours a person will choose to work. He shows that the fixed costs of working are why people choose to work very few hours. Using data from the 1967 National Longitudinal Survey on Mature Women, he considered married women between 30 to 34 years old and considered variables such as the number of young children, husband’s earnings, and individual characteristics such as the level of education and age. He finds the presence of children raises fixed costs by about one-third.

Cogan (1981) ’s original idea of fixed costs has been modified by Edwards and Field-Hendrey (2002) to distinguish home-based work. They use data from the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) to model women’s decisions on labor force participation and the workplace in the US, taking into account specific worker types, such as self-employed and employees. They find that women who have a high cost of working (i.e., living in a rural area, having young children, etc.) have a higher probability of working from home and being self-employed.

In this paper, we use Edwards and Field-Hendrey’s (2002) framework to study the characteristics of workers who were able to telework in Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic. From an efficiency point of view, we argue that the benefits of less time and money spent commuting and more time with the family affect workers’ decisions on where and how to work. Our paper complements the literature that examines 5