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Working Paper
Work from Home After the COVID-19 Outbreak
Based on rich novel survey data on almost 5,000 working age adults, we document that 35.2 percent of the workforce worked entirely from home in May 2020, up from 8.2 percent in February 2020. Highly educated, high-income and white individuals were much more likely to shift to remote work and to maintain employment following the virus outbreak. Using available estimates of the potential number of home-based workers suggests that a large majority (71.7 percent) of U.S. workers that could work from home, effectively did so in May. We provide some evidence indicating that apart from the potential ...
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 ...
Discussion Paper
The Power of Proximity: How Working beside Colleagues Affects Training and Productivity
Firms remain divided about the value of the office for “office” workers. Some firms think that their employees are more productive when working from home. Others believe that the office is a key place for investing in workers’ skills. In this post, which is based on a recent working paper, we examine whether both sides could be right: Could working in the office facilitate investments in workers’ skills for tomorrow that diminish productivity today?
Working Paper
Work from Home After the COVID-19 Outbreak
Based on rich novel survey data, we document that 35.2 percent of the US workforce worked entirely from home in May 2020, up from 8.2 percent in February. Highly educated, high-income and white workers were more likely to shift to working from home and maintain employment following the pandemic. Individuals working from home daily before the pandemic lost employment at similar rates as daily commuters. This suggests that, apart from the potential for home-based work, demand conditions also mattered for job losses. We find that 71.7 percent of workers that could work from home effectively did ...
Journal Article
Cell Phone Data Suggest Persistent Differences in Work from Home by Income, Race, and Education during the Pandemic
Social-distancing policies to combat the spread of COVID-19 led to an initial spike in work from home. We use high-frequency cell phone geolocation data to assess how work from home has evolved since then. We show that work from home declined as restrictions eased but remains above pre-pandemic levels. In addition, we find that differences across income, race, and education in work from home that emerged with the pandemic persist a year later.
Working Paper
Work from Home Before and After the COVID-19 Outbreak
Based on novel survey data, we document the evolution of commuting behavior in the U.S. over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Work from home (WFH) increased sharply and persistently after the outbreak, and much more so among some workers than others. Using theory and evidence, we argue that the observed heterogeneity in WFH transitions is consistent with potentially more permanent changes to work arrangements in some occupations, and not just temporary substitution in response to greater health risks. Consistent with increased WFH adoption, many more – especially higher-educated – ...
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 ...
Working Paper
COVID-19 Is a Persistent Reallocation Shock
Drawing on data from the firm-level Survey of Business Uncertainty, we present three pieces of evidence that COVID-19 is a persistent reallocation shock. First, rates of excess job and sales reallocation over 24-month periods have risen sharply since the pandemic struck, especially for sales. We compute these rates by aggregating over monthly firm-level observations that look back 12 months and ahead 12 months. Second, as of December 2020, firm-level forecasts of sales revenue growth over the next year imply a continuation of recent changes, not a reversal. Third, COVID-19 shifted relative ...
Journal Article
Were Teleworkable Jobs Pandemic-Proof?
While the majority of pandemic-related job losses have been in occupations where working from home was not possible, work-from-home or “teleworkable” jobs were not pandemic-proof. In addition, the number of teleworkable jobs lost and recovered differed by workers’ sex and education status. Both college-educated and non-college-educated women experienced larger employment losses and slower recoveries in teleworkable jobs than their male counterparts.
Discussion Paper
Understanding the Racial and Income Gap in Commuting for Work Following COVID-19
The introduction of numerous social distancing policies across the United States, combined with voluntary pullbacks in activity as responses to the COVID-19 outbreak, resulted in differences emerging in the types of work that were done from home and those that were not. Workers at businesses more likely to require in-person work—for example, some, but not all, workers in healthcare, retail, agriculture and construction—continued to come in on a regular basis. In contrast, workers in many other businesses, such as IT and finance, were generally better able to switch to working from home ...