Publications
Publications
- 2023
- HBS Working Paper Series
Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space
By: Stephen Hansen, Peter John Lambert, Nick Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Raffaella Sadun and Bledi Taska
Abstract
The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure and characterize
this shift, we examine more than 250 million job vacancy postings across five
English-speaking countries. Our measurements rely on a state-of-the-art language-processing
framework that we fit, test, and refine using 30,000 human classifications.
We achieve 99% accuracy in flagging job postings that advertise hybrid or fully remote
work, greatly outperforming dictionary methods and also outperforming other
machine-learning methods. From 2019 to early 2023, the share of postings that say
new employees can work remotely one or more days 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.
Keywords
Remote Work; Hybrid Work; Work From Home (WFH); Pandemic; Labor Market; Job Search; Job Design and Levels; Trends
Citation
Hansen, Stephen, Peter John Lambert, Nick Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Raffaella Sadun, and Bledi Taska. "Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 31007, March 2023. (Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 23-059, March 2023.)