Remote Work and City Structure

Ferdinando Monte, Charly Porcher and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

No 31494, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Relative to remote work, working downtown facilitates valuable interactions with other in-office workers, but entails commuting costs. The resulting coordination mechanism can lead to multiple stationary equilibria with different levels of remote work. Temporary reductions in commuter shares, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can then lead to persistently large fractions of remote workers. Consistently, using cell-phone-based mobility data for the U.S., we document that trips in the largest cities have stabilized at levels that are only about 60% of pre-pandemic levels, while smaller cities have returned to pre-pandemic levels. U.S. cities that exhibit multiplicity experience average welfare losses of 2.3%.

JEL-codes: D24 J22 J23 J61 O33 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: EFG ITI
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31494.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Remote Work and City Structure (2023)
Working Paper: Remote Work and City Structure (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:nbr:nberwo:31494

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31494

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 ().