About this event

A recent literature identifies distaste for commuting as a key source of rent extraction for local employers. This paper examines the impact of the post-pandemic transition to remote work combining three sources of microdata: millions of online job vacancy postings, worker-level data from social security records, and firm-level financial statements. Exploiting the heterogeneity in shifts to remote work across occupations ? instrumented with shifts observed abroad ? and the heterogeneity in occupational shares across commuting zones and industries, we implement a shift-share design and identify an attenuating effect of remote work on labor market power. According to our estimates, without the 2019-2023 transition there would be a one-fifth larger departure from perfect competition in labour markets. These findings are robust to a variety of specifications, taking into account recent advances in the econometrics of shift-share research designs.

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This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.