Why Are Nordic Workers so Remote?: Potential Causes and (Some) Indirect Labor Market Consequences

Adam Gill, Lena Hensvik and Oskar Skans

No 33581, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In this article, we show that working from home is much more prevalent in the Nordic countries than in the rest of Europe and we discuss potential causes and labor market consequences of this stylized fact. Likely contributing causes include a good technological infrastructure and comparatively widespread digital preparedness in the population. Recent research also suggests that trust is a crucial prerequisite for maintaining a spatial separation between supervisors and workers in marginal occupations. We show that survey measures of trust are extremely high in all Nordic countries, and that these measures correlate very strongly with work-from-home across countries and industries in Europe even controlling for a range of cross-country differences. Finally, we discuss potential spillover effects of increased hybrid work on the Nordic labor markets. We show evidence suggesting that increased hybrid work has caused a relocation of the production of local service firms from business centers to high-work-from-home residential areas, without affecting average commuting distances of service workers.

JEL-codes: J32 M54 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
Note: LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33581.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:33581

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33581
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().