The Geography of Remote Work

By Fabian Eckert, S. Ganapati, Conor Walsh. Social Science Research Network, 2020

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The large cities in the US are the most expensive places to live. Paradoxically, this cost is disproportionately paid 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 skilland 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 result, low-skill service workers in big cities bore most of the recent pandemic’s economic impact.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71c715e38979d69392e4c214aa80b589b4f505fb

Citations in the corpus

• The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for density: Evidence from the U.S. housing market (2020, unknown): “Recent papers have docuented migration and bid-rent curve patterns consistent with ur findings (Ramani and Bloom, 2021; Althoff et al., 2020; Gupta t al., 2021).”
• Work from Home Before and After the COVID-19 Outbreak (2020, unknown): “Reductions in spending on non-tradable services in city centers is likely to disproportionately affect lower-income and less-educated workers (Althoff et al., 2022).”