• Media type: Report; E-Book
  • Title: Working remotely? Selection, treatment, and the market for remote work
  • Contributor: Emanuel, Natalia [Author]; Harrington, Emma [Author]
  • Published: New York, NY: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2023
  • Language: English
  • Keywords: remote work ; selection ; worker productivity ; work-from-home ; L84 ; M54 ; J24 ; L23
  • Origination:
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  • Description: How does remote work affect productivity and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We estimate both effects in a U.S. Fortune 500 firm's call centers that employed both remote and on-site workers in the same jobs. Prior to COVID-19, remote workers answered 12 percent fewer calls per hour than on-site workers. When the call centers closed due to COVID-19, the productivity of formerly on-site workers declined by 4 percent relative to already-remote workers, indicating that a third of the initial gap was due to a negative treatment effect of remote work. Yet an 8 percent productivity gap persisted, indicating that the majority of the productivity gap was due to negative worker selection into remote work. Difference-in-differences designs also indicate that remote work degraded call quality- particularly for inexperienced workers-and reduced workers' promotion rates. In a model of the market provision of remote work, we find that firms were in a prisoner's dilemma: all firms would have gained from offering comparable remote and on-site jobs, but any individual firm was loathe to attract less productive workers.
  • Access State: Open Access