Work from Home and Disability Employment

Nicholas Bloom; Gordon B. Dahl; Dan-Olof Rooth

doi:10.3386/w32943

Work from Home and Disability Employment

Nicholas Bloom, Gordon B. Dahl & Dan-Olof Rooth

Working Paper 32943

DOI 10.3386/w32943

Issue Date September 2024

Revision Date May 2025

There has been a dramatic rise in disability employment since the pandemic. At the same time, work from home (WFH) has risen four-fold. This paper asks whether the two are causally related. Controlling for compositional changes and labor market tightness, a 1 percentage point increase in WFH increases full-time employment by 1.0% for individuals with a physical disability. The post-pandemic increase in working from home explains 68%-85% of the rise in full-time employment. Wage data suggests that WFH increased the supply of workers with a physical disability, likely by reducing commuting costs and enabling better control of working conditions.

Funding to conduct the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes was generously provided by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Stanford University, Chicago Booth School of Business, Asociacion Mexicana de Cultura A.C., Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Toulouse Network for Information Technology, the MIT Mobility Initiative, and the Hoover Institution. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Nicholas Bloom
I worked for McKinsey and company as a management consultant from 2001-2002. I have not received any funding from them after that time.

I am part of the Toulouse Network for Information Technology, which carries out research on IT and productivity. From this network I receive an annual honorarium, which is funded by Microsoft.

I do occasional consulting on management practices for government and policy agencies, like the Canadian Government, the World Bank, the European Union, the British Government, and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.

I produced a report in 2008 for the World Economic Forum on management practices in private equity for which I received an honorarium.

I am a paid speaker at corporate events at which I discuss among other things working from home, management practices and policy uncertainty.
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Nicholas Bloom, Gordon B. Dahl, and Dan-Olof Rooth, "Work from Home and Disability Employment," NBER Working Paper 32943 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3386/w32943.

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- September 12, 2024

Work from Home and Disability Employment

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