Commuting Time, Flexibility, and Job Security
By Bert van Landeghem, Thomas Dohmen & Arne Risa Hole
We analyse workers’ preferences for wages, commute time, working-from-home, flexibility, job security, and social impact using discrete choice experiments from 2022 and 2025 with about 4,000 Flemish employees. Preferences for shorter commutes and flexible schedules remain stable post-pandemic, with substantial willingness-to-pay (WTP) for these attributes. However, WTP for job security declined and the value of socially impactful jobs disappeared by 2025. Latent class analysis identifies distinct groups differing in their valuation of non-wage attributes, linked to education and commuting experiences. Our results highlight the persistent demand for flexibility and commute benefits along with the shifting views on security and the meaning of jobs.
Source SSRN
