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Publications
  • 2023
  • Working Paper
  • 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
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
  • | Pages:61
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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.)
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About The Author

Raffaella Sadun

Strategy
→More Publications

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More from the Authors
  • Management and Firm Dynamism By: Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh and John Van Reenen
  • Training Within Firms By: Brayan Diaz, Andrea Neyra-Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun and Jorge Tamayo
  • The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment on Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise By: Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Charles Ayoubi, Hila Lifshitz, Raffaella Sadun, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, Yi Han, Jeff Goldman, Hari Nair, Stew Taub and Karim R. Lakhani
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