How Many Americans Work Remotely? A Survey of Surveys and Their Measurement Issues / Erik Brynjolfsson, John J. Horton, Christos Makridis, Alexandre Mas, Adam Ozimek, Daniel Rock, Hong-Yi TuYe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brynjolfsson, Erik.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Horton, John J.

Makridis, Christos.

Mas, Alexandre.

Ozimek, Adam.

Rock, Daniel.

TuYe, Hong-Yi.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w31193.

NBER working paper series no. w31193

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.

Summary:

Remote work surged during the Covid pandemic but there is disagreement about the extent of the change. To address this question, we field a new, nationally-representative survey: the Remote Life Survey (RLS). We find that in October 2020, 31.6 percent of the continuously employed workforce always worked from home (WFH) and 21.9 percent sometimes or rarely WFH, totaling 53.5 percent. We compare our results with alternative measurement approaches, with a focus on government surveys and provide estimates on the impact of four factors: (a) differences among mail versus web-based survey respondents, (b) differences in the inclusion of self-employed workers, (c) the industry mix of the sample, and (d) the exclusion of people who were already remote pre-pandemic. We find that the last explanation (d) explains the bulk of the difference in estimates between the Current Population Survey (CPS) and other measures of remote work. Policymakers and researchers who turn to the BLS-CPS data series for an estimate of remote work prevalence in the American economy should note that it might be underestimating WFH levels by up to 25 percentage points. Under our preferred estimates, we find that about half of the U.S. workforce worked remotely at least one day each week as of December 2020.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2023.