Working Remotely and the Supply-side Impact of Covid-19

Abstract

We thank Carola Frydman for helpful comments and discussions. We are grateful to Nathaniel Barlow and Jorge Colmenares-Miralles for excellent research assistance and Evan Soltas, SafeGraph, and the Risk Management Institute (RMI) of the National University of Singapore for sharing their data. Please see https://sites.google.com/site/lawrencedwschmidt/covid19 for additional information and data related to the analysis conducted in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Work from Home After the COVID-19 Outbreak

“…An alternative interpretation, however, is that there are additional constraints to home-based work that are not fully captured by the Dingel and Neiman (2020) estimates. A range of recent papers have proposed refinements or alternative measures (Adams-Prassl et al, 2020a,b;Alon et al, 2020;Gottlieb et al, 2020;Hensvik et al, 2020;Leibovici et al, 2020;Mongey et al, 2020;Papanikolaou and Schmidt, 2020;Su, 2020). While all of these could be confronted with the RPS evidence, we leave this for future work.…”

“…Our survey evidence provides key facts to help understand the nature and extent of the labor market disruptions caused by the pandemic. Assessments of the impact of social distancing have so far relied mostly on various proxies of potential work-from-home capacity (Adams-Prassl et al, 2020a,b;Dingel and Neiman, 2020;Gottlieb et al, 2020;Hensvik et al, 2020;Mongey et al, 2020;Papanikolaou and Schmidt, 2020;Su, 2020). We document the differences between estimates of the potential for home-based work in the literature, and actual home-based work in the RPS.…”

Working from home and income inequality: risks of a ‘new normal’ with COVID-19

“…UK, Germany), as well as in Latin American and Caribbean countries (Delaporte and Pena 2020). Papanikolaou and Schmidt (2020) examine differences in the opportunity of workers across industries to have WFH using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). As for Italy, Boeri et al (2020), relying on the US O*NET dataset, estimate that 24% of jobs can be carried out from home, while Barbieri et al (2020) rank sectors and occupations according to the risk of contagion and propose an indicator of WFH feasibility to understand in which sectors this risk can be reduced without any interruction from working.…”

Work from Home After the COVID-19 Outbreak

“…Baqaee et al (2020) offer a quantitative assessment of reopening strategies involving prolonged home-based work versus others that do not.7 Gottlieb, Grobovšek, and Poschke (2020) use the measures inDingel and Neiman (2020) to quantify the feasibility of working from home across countries.8 Alon et al (2020) instead rely on survey questions in the Leave and Job Flexibilities Models of ATUS to assess the scope for remote work. They conclude that that 28 percent of male workers and 22 percent of female workers are employed in highly telecommutable occupations Papanikolaou and Schmidt (2020). also use the Leave and Job Flexibilities Models of ATUS to calculate the fraction of workers by industry who said "there are days they are working only at home" and show that this measure is highly correlated with employment changes between March and April in the CPS Leibovici, Santacreu, and Famiglietti (2020).…”