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 re-opens, 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.
Four 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 operation of the corporate bond market during the pandemic (28868). Another examines the changes in the earnings of UK workers during the pandemic, and compares these changes with those in previous recessions (28871). One explores the political economy of the distribution of federal pandemic relief across states (28875), while another tracks changes in residential location, in particular the migration from dense urban areas to less dense suburbs (28876).
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 Like all NBER papers, they are circulated for discussion and comment, and have not been peer-reviewed.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
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.
Transport improvements such as new highways not only reduce commuting times and increase firm productivity, but also raise welfare by reducing the time spent when households make trips related to consumption, according to a study using data from Tokyo by Yuhei Miyauchi, Kentaro Nakajima and Stephen J. Redding.
Analysis of data from hundreds of economics research seminars and job market presentations finds that women presenters are asked more questions that these questions are more likely to be patronizing or hostile, Pascaline Dupas, Alicia Sasser Modestino, Muriel Niederle, Justin Wolfers, and The Seminar Dynamics Collective report.
Short-term risk in the transition to renewable energy is greater for firms in countries with lower economic development, greater reliance on fossil energy, and less inclusive political systems, while long-term transition risk is higher in countries with stricter domestic, but not international, climate policies, Patrick Bolton and Marcin Kacperczyk find.
Leveraging the COVID-19 shock, survey data on 1,500 undergraduates collected by Esteban M. Aucejo, Jacob F. French, and Basit Zafar shows willingness to pay for in-person relative to remote instruction represents around 4.2 percent of the average annual net cost of attending university, compared to 8.1 percent for on-campus social activities.
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