How many jobs can be done at home?

By Jonathan I. Dingel, Brent Neiman. Journal of Public Economics, 2020

2,001 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Evaluating the economic impact of “social distancing” measures taken to arrest the spread of COVID-19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy: how many jobs can be performed at home? We classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations and merge this classification with occupational employment counts. We find that 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home, with significant variation across cities and industries. These jobs typically pay more than jobs that cannot be done at home and account for 46% of all US wages. Applying our occupational classification to 85 other countries reveals that lower-income economies have a lower share of jobs that can be done at home.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9bb3ada618a4e214a5f3a724b718fa000ff5a3d3

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Citations in the corpus

Macroeconomic Dynamics and Reallocation in an Epidemic: Evaluating the “Swedish Solution” (2020, positive): “Our analysis is inspired by and shares many features with the model of Eichenbaum et al. (2020), ERT for short from now on.”
Wage inequality and poverty effects of lockdown and social distancing in Europe (2020, positive): “First, we make use of teleworking information acquired using key attributes and characteristics of occupations from the American O ∗NET database ( Dingel and Neiman, 2020 ).”
Risk Perception Through the Lens of Politics in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, positive): “…behavior on Google and geospatial mapping data capturing changes in individuals’ daily travel distance and trips to non-essential businesses and 18 Dingel and Neiman (2020) classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations, and merge this classification with occupational…”
Consumer Spending Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Assessment of Great Britain (2020, background): “In a cross-country analysis, Dingel & Neiman (2020) find that lower-income economies have a lower proportion of jobs that can be performed from home.”
A First Look at the Impact of COVID-19 on Commercial Real Estate Prices: Asset-Level Evidence (2020, neutral): “Dingel and Neiman (2020) conclude that 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home.”
Teleworkability and the COVID-19 crisis: a new digital divide? (2020, methodology): “Mongey et al. (2020) combine the two previous approaches by Dingel and Neiman (2020) and Leibovici et al. (2020) to construct two indicators of teleworkability: “work from home” and “physical proximity”.”
Working from home across countries (2020, methodology): “We build a WFH measure based on two criteria, paralleling Dingel and Neiman (2020a).”
The Role of Corporate Culture in Bad Times: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, neutral): “(2020), LABOR_INTENSITY is the ratio of the number of employees to sales, and WFH is a firm’s industry’s fraction of jobs that can be performed at home (Dingel and Neiman (2020)).”