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.
Discussion Paper
Remote Work and COVID-19: What Have Firms Learned?
Working Paper
The Shift to Remote Work Lessens Wage-Growth Pressures
The recent shift to remote work raised the amenity value of employment. As compensation adjusts to share the amenity-value gains with employers, wage-growth pressures moderate. We find empirical support for this mechanism in the wage-setting behavior of US employers, and we develop novel survey data to quantify its force. Our data imply a cumulative wage-growth moderation of 2.0 percentage points over two years. This moderation offsets more than half the real-wage catchup effect that Blanchard (2022) highlights in his analysis of near-term inflation pressures. The amenity-values gains ...
Working Paper
Measuring Trends in Work From Home: Evidence from Six U.S. Datasets
This paper documents the prevalence of work from home (WFH) in six U.S. data sets. These surveys measure WFH using different questions, reference periods, samples, and survey collection methods. Once we construct samples and WFH measures that are comparable across surveys, all surveys broadly agree about the trajectory of aggregate WFH since the Covid-19 outbreak. The surveys agree that pre-pandemic differences in WFH rates by sex, education, and state of residence expanded following the Covid-19 outbreak. The surveys also show similar post-pandemic trends in WFH by firm size and industry. ...
Journal Article
The Shifting Expectations for Work from Home
As COVID-19 moves to an endemic state, employers have brought workers back to the office. Many workers prefer to continue working from home a portion of time, resulting in a gap between employee preferences for work from home and employer plans. Knowing who currently works from home a larger share of time and where this gap is narrowest across worker characteristics and locations helps explain where and for whom work from home is most likely to remain a permanent feature in the labor market.Using a relatively new data source, the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, Jason P. Brown ...
Journal Article
Does Working from Home Boost Productivity Growth?
An enduring consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is a notable shift toward remote and hybrid work. This has raised questions regarding whether the shift had a significant effect on the growth rate of U.S. productivity. Analyzing the relationship between GDP per hour growth and the ability to telework across industries shows that industries that are more adaptable to remote work did not experience a bigger decline or boost in productivity growth since 2020 than less adaptable industries. Thus, teleworking most likely has neither substantially held back nor boosted productivity growth.
Report
Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work
How does remote work affect productivity and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We estimate both effects in a U.S. Fortune 500 firm’s call centers that employed both remote and on-site workers in the same jobs. Prior to COVID-19, remote workers answered 12 percent fewer calls per hour than on-site workers. When the call centers closed due to COVID-19, the productivity of formerly on-site workers declined by 4 percent relative to already-remote workers, indicating that a third of the initial gap was due to a negative treatment effect of remote work. Yet an 8 percent ...