The Geography of Remote Work

Lukas Althoff, Fabian Eckert, Sharat Ganapati and Conor Walsh

No 29181, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: O33 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-isf, nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Lukas Althoff & Fabian Eckert & Sharat Ganapati & Conor Walsh, 2022. "The geography of remote work," Regional Science and Urban Economics, .

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