Telecommuting and the recovery of passenger aviation post-COVID-19

Anca D. Cristea and Anna Miromanova

Economics of Transportation, 2025, vol. 42, issue C

Abstract: Air passenger transport has been dramatically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic due to lockdown policies and social distancing mandates. However, once restrictions were lifted, air traffic has reverted very slowly to pre-pandemic levels with many markets still recovering from the downturn. We try to understand what causes this sluggish recovery of air passenger transport and ask whether it could be related to structural changes in business and working arrangements post-pandemic. Specifically, we consider if the dramatic shift towards telecommuting and remote work has transformed the nature of business interactions in the marketplace, leading to a negative demand shock for air travel. We use U.S. city-level data on the fraction of jobs that can be performed remotely to proxy for telecommuting, and employ a difference-in-differences estimation method to investigate if air travel demand post-COVID is lower in cities with a larger share of remote work, all else equal. An event study analysis using monthly data evaluates differences in air passenger traffic across cities in the periods leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak and during its aftermath, distinguishing between cities with a higher versus lower share of remote jobs. All the estimation results lend support to the hypothesis that the raise in telecommuting following the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down the recovery of air travel to pre-pandemic levels.

Keywords: Air travel; Air passenger transport; Aviation industry; COVID-19; Telecommuting; Remote work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 R12 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212012225000176
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecotra:v:42:y:2025:i:c:s2212012225000176

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecotra.2025.100409

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Transportation is currently edited by Mogens Fosgerau and Erik Verhoef

More articles in Economics of Transportation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().