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Discussion Paper
What Have Workers Done with the Time Freed up by Commuting Less?
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way Americans spend their time. One of the most enduring shifts has occurred in the workplace, with millions of employees making the switch to work from home. Even as the pandemic has waned, more than 15 percent of full-time employees remain fully remote and an additional 30 percent work in hybrid arrangements (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis). These changes have substantially reduced time spent commuting to work; in the aggregate, Americans now spend 60 million fewer hours traveling to work each day. In this post, we investigate how people spend ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Jobs and the Gender Wage Gap
Prior studies have shown that women are more willing to trade off wages for short commutes than men. Given the gender difference in commuting preferences, we show that the wage return to commuting (i.e., the wage penalty for reducing commute time) that stems from the spatial distribution of jobs contributes to the gender wage gap. We propose a simple job choice model, which predicts that differential commuting preferences would lead to a larger gender wage gap for workers who face greater wage returns to commuting based on their locations of residence and occupations. We then show empirical ...
Journal Article
Hybrid Working, Commuting Time, and the Coming Long-Term Boom in Home Construction
The long commuting times from outer suburbs to the central business districts of large metropolitan areas have depressed single-family home construction over the last two decades. The shift to hybrid working during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, has reduced the time many people spend commuting and potentially increased their willingness to live farther from employers. Lightly settled land at the peripheries of metropolitan areas may become more desirable for development, relaxing a long-standing constraint on single-family home construction.In this article, Jordan Rappaport estimates the ...