COVID-19 and Remote Work: An Early Look at US Data

By Erik Brynjolfsson, John Joseph Horton, A. Ozimek, Daniel Rock, Garima Sharma, Hong Yi Tu Ye. 2020

753 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the results of a nationally-representative sample of the US population during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey ran in two waves from April 1-5, 2020 and May 2-8, 2020. Of those employed pre-COVID-19, we find that about half are now working from home, including 35.2% who report they were commuting and recently switched to working from home. In addition, 10.1% report being laid-off or furloughed since the start of COVID-19. There is a strong negative relationship between the fraction in a state still commuting to work and the fraction working from home. We find that the share of people switching to remote work can be predicted by the incidence of COVID-19 and that younger people were more likely to switch to remote work. Furthermore, states with a higher share of employment in information work including management, professional and related occupations were more likely to shift toward working from home and had fewer people laid off or furloughed. We find no substantial change in results between the two waves, suggesting that most changes to remote work manifested by early April.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Modeling and Simulation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3147c12b538b06ffdda70fa0b5db9304a8374dbd

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Citations in the corpus

Why Working from Home Will Stick (2020, background): “1 Drawing on several independently conducted surveys, Barrero et al. (2020), Bick et al. (2020), Brynjolfsson et al. (2020), and Ozimek (2020) find that about half of paid workhours were supplied from home in the Spring of 2020.”
Job search during the COVID-19 crisis (2020, neutral): “We consider a Cobb-Douglas matching function, which defines the aggregate number of hires as: M ¼ m0ðsUÞgV1 g ð6Þ where the elasticity of matching wrt to effective search unit (g) is equal to 0.45 (Petrongolo and Pissarides, 2001; BorowczykMartins et al., 2013; Cahuc et al., 2019).”
Heterogeneous Labor Market Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “…asymmetric occupation- and industry-level effects may reflect heterogeneities in the extent to which different jobs can be performed remotely (see Brynjolfsson et al. 2020; Dingel and Neiman 2020; Ruiz-Euler et al. 2020; Mongey et al. 2021), as well as differences in the economic impacts of the…”
The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers (2020, background): “During COVID-19, 34.1% of Americans switched to work from home [5] .”
Building a Foundation for Data-Driven, Interpretable, and Robust Policy Design using the AI Economist (2021, background): “Early US data has also shown the unequal distribution and unemployment effects of remote work across industries (49).”
Work that Can Be Done from Home: Evidence on Variation within and Across Occupations and Industries (2020, background): “Second, our paper relates to the literature documenting the prevalence of alternative work arrangements including telework before and during the pandemic as well as individual preferences for alternative work arrangements (e.g. Oettinger 2011; Mas and Pallais 2017, 2020; Hensvik, Le Barbanchon and R”
The impact of COVID-19 on gender inequality in the labor market and gender-role attitudes (2020, background): “Around the globe, many workers are currently being asked to telecommute or perform work at home (e.g. Brynjolfsson et al. 2020; Frodermann et al. 2020; Yasenov 2020).”
Sheltering in place and domestic violence: Evidence from calls for service during COVID-19 (2020, positive): “Approximately 35% of workers shifted to working remotely (Dingel and Neiman, 2020; Papanikolaou and Schmidt, 2020; Brynjolfsson et al., 2020) as public school children shifted to learning remotely.”
A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, neutral): “Campello et al. (2020) find that job losses have been more severe for industries with highly concentrated labor markets (i.”
The Donut Effect of Covid-19 on Cities (2021, positive): “Others look at the share of workers actually working-from-home during Covid (Barrero, Bloom and Davis 2020, Brynjolfsson et al 2020, DeFilipis et al 2020 and Bick et al 2020) or survey managers about remote work (Ozimek, 2020a).”
The Impact of Covid-19 on Productivity (2020, neutral): “Some examples include, Bartik et al. (2020a and 2020b), Brynjolfsson et al. (2020), Gourinchas et al. (2020), and Papanikolaou and Schmidt (2020) who show pervasive impacts on firms.”