The Ability to Work Remotely: Measures and Implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our paper explores how the ability to work remotely has changed over time, its relationship with demographic characteristics and employment outcomes, and the role it played during the pandemic recession. We focus on two different remote work indexes, a measure of “no physical presence”—proposed by Dingel and Neiman (2020)—and a measure of “remote communications”—presented by Montenovo et al. (2020). While the two measures suggest a similar prevalence of remote work in recent years and display fairly similar behaviors across demographic groups and in terms of wage and employment outcomes, their evolution is significantly different. While the share of occupations that require no physical presence has remained relatively constant since July 2003, the share of those occupations featuring remote communications increased more than 40 percentage points over the same period. Those differing evolutions paint a starkly different picture of the role of remote work during the pandemic: Compared to a counterfactual scenario that keeps the remote classification constant at the 2004 levels for each measure, the index of no physical presence suggests that there would have been little changes in terms of aggregate hours losses during the pandemic, while the index of remote communications points to much larger declines in aggregate hours. Even without much change in the ability of working remotely, the trend towards more remote work underscores the importance of the hours margin as an additional dimension for the realization of gains from working at home.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".