What Jobs are Being Done at Home During the Covid-19 Crisis? Evidence from Firm-Level Surveys

By Alexander W. Bartik, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca, Christopher T. Stanton. Social Science Research Network, 2020

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The threat of COVID-19 has increased the health risks of going to an office or factory, leading more workers to do their jobs remotely. In this paper, we provide results from firm surveys on both small and large businesses on the prevalence and productivity of remote work, and expectations about the persistence of remote work once the COVID-19 crisis ends. We present four main findings. First, while overall levels of remote work are high, there is considerable variation across industries. The Dingel and Neiman (2020) measure of suitability for remote work does a remarkably good job of predicting the industry level patterns of remote work - highlighting the challenge of moving many industries to remote work. Second, remote work is much more common in industries with better educated and better paid workers. Third, in our larger survey, employers think that there has been less productivity loss from remote working in better educated and higher paid industries. Fourth, more than one-third of firms that had employees switch to remote work believe that remote work will remain more common at their company even after the COVID-19 crisis ends.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f96bfa66939081bbe98aead0a8c8123917e0d735

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Marketing

In Sociology and Political Science

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): “After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many office orkers started to work from home (Bartik et al., 2020; Bick t al., 2020).”
A New Spatial Hedonic Equilibrium in the Emerging Work-from-Home Economy? (2021, background): “The empirical study of Stanton and Tiwari (2021) recognizes, however, that the houses of remote workers may need be larger to offer adequate office space.”
A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, background): “For instance, Bartik et al. (2020) and Kurmann et al. (2020) rely on worker-firm matched daily data drawn from “Homebase,” a scheduling and time clock software provider, to construct real-time data for small businesses.”
The Targeting and Impact of Paycheck Protection Program Loans to Small Businesses (2020, unknown): “Recent research has studied the effects of PPP loans, exploiting variation in PPP loan receipt intensity between firms of different sizes (Chetty et al. 2020, Autor et al. 2020) and locations (Granja et al. 2020, and Bartik et al. 2020c).”
A First Look at the Impact of COVID-19 on Commercial Real Estate Prices: Asset-Level Evidence (2020, unknown): “Perhaps because of these complications and uncertainties, most studies (e.g., Chetty et al. 2020; Bartik et al. 2020; Villas-Boas et al. 2020) find that”