Cluster-Seminar Public Finances and Living Conditions

Stock market participation jumped upwards in Germany in the year 2020 by about 25%. A major cause for this was the enforced use of remote work. We show this by repeating a benchmark study with demanding data requests and adding remote work to the explanatory variables. Moreover, we implement an instrumental variables estimation based on commuting distance and work-from- home capacity. The transmission channel seems to work via relaxing time constraints. Finally, we use changes in the Theil Index to show that remote work has a distributional effect, as it makes the stock market accessible to a broader population, including lower income groups.