616/2022 Mirko Draca, Emma Duchini, Roland Rathelot, Arthur Turrell, and Giulia Vattuone

The pandemic was accompanied by a wave of adoption of remote work practices. This paper uses online job vacancy data to study how UK firms have adopted remote work. Overall, remote work increased by 300%. Our analysis finds little evidence that occupations have fundamentally changed to better accommodate remote work tasks, nor evidence of changes in the occupational composition of jobs. We find that the overall increase in remote working is driven by the increasing use of remote work at the firm level, especially among firms that were less likely to use remote work before the pandemic. This is consistent with changes in organisational practices or updated information about the viability of large-scale remote working.

Public Policy