Publications

2021
Working Paper

Housing Consumption and the Cost of Remote Work

By: Christopher Stanton and Pratyush Tiwari

This paper estimates housing choice differences between households with and without remote workers. Prior to the pandemic, the expenditure share on housing was more than seven percent higher for remote households compared to similar non-remote households in the same... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Geographic Mobility; Housing; Cost; Geographic Location; Income

2023
Working Paper

Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space

By: Stephen Hansen, Peter John Lambert, Nick Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Raffaella Sadun and Bledi Taska

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... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Hybrid Work; Work From Home (WFH); Pandemic; Labor Market; Job Search; Job Design and Levels; Trends

The International Price of Remote Work

We use data from a large web-based job platform to study how the price of remote work is determined in a globalized labor market. In the platform, workers located around the world compete for jobs that can be done... View Details

August 24, 2020
Editorial

How to (Actually) Save Time When You're Working Remotely

By: Lauren C. Howe, A.V. Whillans and Jochen I. Menges

The pandemic has given many of us the opportunity to ditch the commute and work from home long-term, offering huge potential time savings. But to truly reap the benefits of remote work during the current crisis and beyond, we need to think proactively about how we... View Details

Keywords: Time; Remote Work; COVID-19 Pandemic; Work-Life Balance; Time Management; Well-being

2023
Working Paper

Location-Specificity and Geographic Competition for Remote Workers

By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Evan Starr

The precipitous growth of remote work has given rise to a new phenomenon: geographic competition between localities for the physical presence of remote workers. Remote workers with high general human capital may create value for their new destinations and reverse net... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Human Capital; Geographic Location; Civil Society or Community; Motivation and Incentives

SSRN

January–February 2025
Article

Location-Specificity and Relocation Incentive Programs for Remote Workers

By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Evan Starr

The precipitous growth of remote work has given rise to a new phenomenon: the emergence of relocation incentive programs that localities use to compete for the physical presence of remote workers. Remote workers with high general human capital may create value for... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Motivation and Incentives; Geographic Location; Talent and Talent Management; Human Capital; Tulsa

18 Jun 2021
News

Remote Work Revolution

March 16, 2020
Article

15 Questions About Remote Work, Answered

By: Tsedal Neeley

How should corporate leaders, managers and individual workers shift to remote work in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic? Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, has spent two decades helping companies learn how to manage dispersed teams. In this... View Details

Keywords: Coronavirus Pandemic; Remote Work; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Management Practices and Processes

2025
Working Paper

Managing Remote Work Quality: Evidence from Auditing Management Systems Standards

By: Ashley Palmarozzo, Michael W. Toffel and Melissa Ouellet

Remote work has become more common, providing operational flexibility and productivity benefits, but questions remain about whether and how it affects work quality. We investigate the quality effects of remote work in a context in which remote work separates workers... View Details

Keywords: Audit; Auditing; Remote Work; Compliance; Assessment; Environment; Management Systems; Quality Management; Quality Management System; Quality; Operations; Supply Chain Management; Environmental Management; Safety

SSRN

September 7, 2020
Article

Remote Networking as a Person of Color

By: Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo

In remote work situations, where people cannot rely on impromptu elevator conversations or water cooler chats with coworkers, the answer isn’t to turn inward. In fact, the need for networking is even more important. In particular, our interactions with people whose... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Networking; Networks; Interpersonal Communication; Race

September 15, 2022
Article

Work-From-Anywhere as a Public Policy: 3 Findings from the Tulsa Remote Program

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Evan Starr and Thomaz Teodorovicz

The adoption of work-from-anywhere by organizations might help smaller towns and communities across the country attract talent and reverse brain drain, by incentivizing remote workers to migrate to such locations. We evaluate how the Tulsa Remote program, which... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Grants; Labor; Government Administration; Tulsa

19 Jul 2020
News

Remote Work Revolution

April 2020 (Revised February 2023)
Case

GitLab and the Future of All-Remote Work (A)

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Emma Salomon

GitLab is arguably one of the world’s largest “all-remote” companies. Started in 2011 and with more than 1,000 employees at present, it has no physical offices and all employees, including the entire C-Suite, work remotely from all parts of the world. The case... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Value Creation; Business Model; Organizational Structure

Educators

Forthcoming
Article

The Rise of Remote Work: Evidence on Productivity and Preferences from Firm and Worker Surveys

By: Alexander Bartik, Zoë Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca and Christopher Stanton

Drawing on surveys of small business owners and employees, we present three main findings about the evolution of remote work after the onset of COVID-19. First, uptake of remote work was abrupt and widespread in jobs suitable for telework according to the task-based... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Remote Work; Health Pandemics; Jobs and Positions; Demographics; Surveys

10 May 2022
News

Remote Work Desire Changing Workforce

27 Oct 2020
News

Give Your Remote Team Unstructured Time for Collaboration

Keywords: Remote work

January 2021 (Revised February 2021)
Case

TCS: From Physical Offices to Borderless Work

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Malini Sen

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a multinational IT services company headquartered in Mumbai, is a subsidiary of one of India’s most reputed conglomerates, the Tata Group. In 2020, TCS was valued at $144.7 billion, the highest for any company in the IT sector,... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Organizational Structure; Change Management; Transformation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Customer Satisfaction; Information Technology Industry; India; Asia; United States; Europe

Educators

31 Oct 2022
News

The Rise of the ‘Chief Remote Officer'

Keywords: remote; hybrid work

March 2022
Case

Unilever: Remote Work in Manufacturing

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Susie L. Ma

In December 2021, Unilever—one of the world’s largest producers of consumer goods—was in the midst of a pilot project to digitize its manufacturing facilities and enable remote work for factory employees. This was possible because of an earlier project to retrofit a... View Details

Keywords: Change; Globalization; Information Technology; Technology Adoption; Human Resources; Jobs and Positions; Operations; Education; Training; Manufacturing Industry

Educators