PRESENTED BY STEPHEN HANSEN (UCL)
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.
Stephen Hansen is Professor of Economics at University College London and Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and CESifo. He previously held positions at Imperial College London, the University of Oxford, and Pompeu Fabra University. He received his PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics in 2009. He previously served as an academic consultant at the Bank of England, and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He currently sits on the scientific advisory board of the Ifo Institute and holds European Research Council Consolidator and Proof-of-Concept Grants. His research has been published in leading international journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, and Journal of Monetary Economics.
Chair: Paul Mizen, King’s College London and ESCoE
Discussant: Sharada Davidson, University of Strathclyde