Computer use for work and job security during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from Korea

We present empirical evidence that computer use for work was associated with lower risks of job insecurity during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic, using survey data from South Korea. The South Korean setting is different from any other advanced country, in that the country never had a lockdown, and the social-distancing measures were much milder. This implies that computer use for work in South Korea during the pandemic is not a mere proxy for remote working, unlike in the existing studies of countries that had a lockdown. We also find evidence that this relation is nonlinear, in the sense that its magnitude is larger for those who use computers most intensively.