Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work

Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington

No 1061, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: How does remote work affect productivity and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We estimate both effects in a U.S. Fortune 500 firm’s call centers that employed both remote and on-site workers in the same jobs. Prior to COVID-19, remote workers answered 12 percent fewer calls per hour than on-site workers. When the call centers closed due to COVID-19, the productivity of formerly on-site workers declined by 4 percent relative to already-remote workers, indicating that a third of the initial gap was due to a negative treatment effect of remote work. Yet an 8 percent productivity gap persisted, indicating that the majority of the productivity gap was due to negative worker selection into remote work. Difference-in-differences designs also indicate that remote work degraded call quality— particularly for inexperienced workers—and reduced workers’ promotion rates. In a model of the market provision of remote work, we find that firms were in a prisoner’s dilemma: all firms would have gained from offering comparable remote and on-site jobs, but any individual firm was loathe to attract less productive workers.

Keywords: remote work; Work-from-home; worker productivity; Selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 L23 L84 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 97
Date: 2023-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr1061.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr1061.html Summary (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:96277

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().