Search Results
Briefing
A Look at the Impact of the Work-From-Home Revolution
In this article, I survey the state of remote work in the American economy and investigate the implications for workers, businesses and local economies. Comprehensive real-time survey data agree: Work from home is here to stay. The ability to offer remote or hybrid arrangements has become an important tool for employers to attract and retain talent, as workers value the flexibility that working from home affords them. Meanwhile, what has been a positive development to many workers poses significant challenges for urban cores that no longer benefit from the daily influx of commuters and their ...
Working Paper
Productivity in the World Economy During and After the Pandemic
This paper reviews how productivity has evolved around the world since the pandemic began in 2020. Productivity in many countries has been volatile. We conclude that the broad contours of productivity growth during this period have been heavily shaped by predictable cyclical patterns. Looking at U.S. industry data, we find little evidence that the sharp rise in telework has had a notable impact, good or bad, on productivity. Stepping back, the data so far appear consistent with a continuation of the slow-productivity-growth trajectory that we faced before the pandemic.
Working Paper
The Tail That Wagged the Dog: What Explains the Persistent Employment Effect of the 10-Day PPP Funding Delay?
This study explores the mechanisms explaining the large, persistent effect of the 10-day funding delay in the 2020 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) on employment recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic, as estimated by Doniger and Kay (2021). We find that the top 1 percent of urban counties by population fully account for the significant effect of the delay on county-level employment. The strong correlation between worse loan delay and slower employment growth in these counties is due to a factor commonly omitted from analyses: The nature of business and the high rate of human interactions in ...
Journal Article
Hybrid Work May Pose Challenge to Bars and Restaurants in Parts of the Tenth Federal Reserve District
As remote or hybrid work continues to be popular, office attendance has fallen. Less in-person work may increase office vacancy rates and reduce foot traffic to other businesses located in office-dense areas. Compared with the national average, most states in the Tenth Federal Reserve District have a lower share of office space in office-dense areas, but some of these areas have a higher share of bars and restaurants. The outlook for these businesses may depend on how foot traffic within office-dense areas evolves.
Working Paper
Work from Home Before and After the COVID-19 Outbreak
Based on novel survey data, we document a persistent rise in work from home (WFH) over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using theory and direct survey evidence,we argue that three quarters of this increase reflects adoption of new work arrangements that will likely be permanent for many workers. A quantitative model matched to surveydata predicts that twice as many workers will WFH full-time post-pandemic compared to pre-pandemic, and that one in every five instead of seven workdays will be WFH. These model predictions are consistent with survey evidence on workers' own expectations about ...
Working Paper
The City Paradox: Skilled Services and Remote Work
Large cities in the US are the most expensive places to live. Paradoxically, this cost is paid disproportionately by workers who could work remotely, and live anywhere. The greater potential for remote work in large cities is mostly accounted for by their specialization in skill- and information-intensive service industries. We highlight that this specialization makes these cities vulnerable to remote work shocks. When high-skill workers begin to work from home or leave the city altogether, they withdraw spending from local consumer service industries that rely heavily on their demand. As a ...
Discussion Paper
The Future of Remote Work in the Region
The coronavirus pandemic abruptly changed the way we work, in meaningful and potentially lasting ways. While working from home represented a small share of work before the pandemic, such arrangements became unexpectedly widespread once the pandemic struck. With the pandemic now being brought under control and conditions improving, workers have begun to return to the office. But just how much remote work will persist in the new normal? The New York Fed’s June regional business surveys asked firms about the extent of remote working before, during, and after the pandemic. Results indicate that ...
Journal Article
Who Should Work from Home During a Pandemic? The Wage-Infection Trade-off
Shutting down the workplace is an effective means of reducing contagion but can induce large economic losses. We harmonize the American Time Use Survey and O*NET data to construct a measure of infection risk (exposure index) and a measure of the ease with which a job can be performed remotely (work-from-home index) across both industries and occupations. The two indexes are negatively correlated but distinct, so the economic costs of containing a pandemic can be minimized by sending home only those workers that are highly exposed to infection risk but that can perform their jobs easily from ...
Discussion Paper
Is Work-from-Home Working?
Though some offices have re-opened as the pandemic has receded, many workers have continued to work from home. Recent survey data suggest that workers would like more remote-work days than firms want to supply—a pattern that was evident even before the pandemic. Why have firms been so reluctant to offer remote work? And what will the recent seismic shift in remote work mean for the economy?
Journal Article
Out of the Office, Into a Financial Crisis?
For decades, the office has offered an alternative to the manual labor that defined work for most of human history. But it came with its own set of headaches for workers.Those headaches have provided fuel for movies like Office Space and The Devil Wears Prada and TV shows like Severance and The Office. The COVID-19 pandemic gave many Americans the chance to live out their dreams of escaping their commutes and the annoyances of the modern workplace. In the initial months of the pandemic in 2020, most offices shut down. More than 60 percent of all paid full days were worked from home.