National Bureau of Economic Research
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Why Working from Home Will Stick
During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than one third of all employees shifted from in-person to remote work. The share is substantially higher in some industries and in many cities. As the pandemic recedes and the economy reopens, will the fraction of employees working from home return to pre-pandemic levels? In a new study (28731), NBER affiliates Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago, and Jose Maria Barrero of Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico analyze how work from home has affected worker productivity and job satisfaction. They also look to the future, and conclude that the pandemic experience will have a persistent impact: remote work will be much more prevalent after the pandemic than before. Bloom describes their key findings, which are also summarized in the latest issue of the NBER Digest, in the video below. An archive of NBER videos on pandemic-related research may be found here.
Two NBER working papers distributed this week report on economic, health, and related consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, or on the impact of public policies that respond to it. One studies the effect of the pandemic on the supply chain for food production in the US (28896). The other uses data on behavioral and public health responses to HIV to calibrate models of the spread of COVID-19 and of the economic effects of the disease (28898).
Over 400 NBER working papers have addressed various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These papers are open access and have been collected for easy reference. Like all NBER papers, they are circulated for discussion and comment, and have not been peer-reviewed. View them in reverse chronological order or by topic area.
Mackenzie Alston of Florida State Named First NBER Diversity Fellow
Mackenzie Alston, an assistant professor of economics at Florida State University, has been named the inaugural recipient of the NBER Post-Doctoral Fellowship to Promote Diversity in the Economics Profession. She will spend the 2021-22 academic year conducting research at the NBER’s Cambridge office. The selection committee for this new fellowship chose Alston from among more than 70 applicants.
Alston’s research uses both survey data and experimental methods to investigate the role of discrimination and stereotypes. She has studied the ways in which women respond to labor market discrimination, and the impact of stereotypes on the academic performance of students from under-represented groups. She is currently studying how the recent social justice movement has affected the productivity of college and university faculty members.
Alston received her PhD from Texas A&M University and joined the faculty at Florida State in 2019.
From the NBER Digest
...a free monthly publication of non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
From the NBER Reporter
...a free quarterly featuring affiliates writing about their research, program updates, and NBER news
From the Bulletin on Health
...a free summary of recent NBER Working Papers on health topics, distributed three times a year
From the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
...a free quarterly summarizing research in the NBER's Retirement and Disability Research Center
Featured Working Papers
If the Dow Jones Industrial Average had consistently adjusted for dividends and other corporate actions since 1928, the index would have closed at 1,113,047 instead of 28,538 at the end of 2019, according to Jacky Lin, Genevieve C. Selden, John B. Shoven, and Clemens Sialm.
While automatic government spending — which comprises unemployment insurance, family programs, and social security transfers — is countercyclical in industrial countries, it is procyclical in the developing world, Luciana Galeano, Alejandro Izquierdo, Jorge P. Puig, Carlos A. Veg/h, and Guillermo Vuletin find.
Analysis by Sebastian Edwards and Luis Cabezas of 12 disaggregated price indices in Iceland for the 2003-2019 period finds that the exchange rate pass-through declined around the time Iceland reformed its “flexible inflation targeting” approach.
Data analyzed by Orley C. Ashenfelter and Štěpán Jurajda suggest that McDonald's restaurants pass through the higher costs of minimum wage increases in the form of higher prices for Big Macs. They find no association between the adoption of labor-saving touch-screen ordering technology and minimum wage hikes.
Replacing a plastic bag ban in some Chicago communities with a small tax on all disposable bags generated large decreases in disposable bag use and overall environmental costs, Tatiana Homonoff, Lee-Sien Kao, Javiera Selman, Christina Seybolt find.
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