The Geography of Remote Work

Big city economies specialize in business service industries whose workers’ local spending in turn supports a large local consumer service industry. Business service jobs have a high remote work potential. If remote work becomes more prevalent, many business service workers may leave expensive cities and work from elsewhere withdrawing spending from the local non-tradable service industries dependent on their demand. We use the recent COVID-19-induced increase in remote work to test for the strength of this mechanism and find it to be strong. As a result, low-skill service workers in big cities bore most of the pandemic’s economic impact. Our findings have broader implications for the distributional consequences of the US economy’s transition to more remote work.