Remote Work Across Jobs, Companies and Space

Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Stephen Hansen, Peter John Lambert (), Yabra Muvdi (), Raffaella Sadun and Bledi Taska ()

No 2629, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Abstract: The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure this shift, we develop a large language model (LLM), fine tune and assess it using 30,000 human classifications, and apply it to nearly 600 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. Our model achieves a 98% classification accuracy, greatly outperforming dictionary-based approaches, and matching or surpassing the performance of frontier AI models at a fraction of the cost. From 2019 to 2026, the share of postings that indicate new employees can work remotely at least one day per week rose more than three-fold in the U.S. and by a factor of five or more in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. These developments are highly non-uniform across and within cities, industries, occupations and companies. Even when focusing on employers in the same industry competing for talent in the same occupations, we find large differences in the share of job postings that explicitly offer remote work.

Keywords: remote work; hybrid work; work from home; job vacancies; text classifiers; large language models; pandemic impact; labour markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 E24 M54 O33 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08-19
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/papers/2026/wp2629 (text/html)
https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/2026/wp2629.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Remote work across jobs, companies and space (2023)
Working Paper: Remote work across jobs, companies and space (2023)
Working Paper: Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space (2023)
Working Paper: Remote work across jobs, companies and space (2023)
Working Paper: Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space (2023)
Working Paper: Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space (2023)
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:feddwp:103689

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.24149/wp2629

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Chapman ().