Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space

Stephen Hansen, Peter John Lambert, Nicholas Bloom, Steven Davis, Raffaella Sadun and Bledi Taska

No 31007, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure this shift, we examine more than 500 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. Our measurements rely on a large language model (LLM) that we fine-tune with 30,000 human classifications. The model achieves 99% classification accuracy, substantially outperforming dictionary-based approaches and—despite being a fraction of the size—performs on par with frontier AI models. From 2019 to 2025, the share of postings indicating that 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 zooming in 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.

JEL-codes: C55 E24 M54 O33 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-lma and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

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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)
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