Work from Home and Productivity – A Conversation with Nick Bloom | Economics, Applied | Steven Davis | Hoover Institution

**Steven Davis** (0:06)
Welcome to Economics, Applied.
I'm Steven Davis at the Hoover Institution. Today, I'm here with Nick Bloom to talk about Work from Home and Productivity. Nick is a Stanford economics professor, prolific researcher, noted authority on management practices, economic uncertainty, and work from home.
The topic of today's discussion. His household spans major parts of the Anglosphere. Nick hails from England, as you might notice from his accent. His wife is Scottish, his kids are American, and he lives here on Stanford's campus. Welcome, Nick.

**Nick Bloom** (0:42)
Thanks, Steve, very much for having me on. And I should say we are long-term friends and co-authors as well to add into the mix.

**Steven Davis** (0:49)
We are, and I was just going to put the cards on the table in that respect.
We've worked extensively with Scott Baker on economic policy uncertainty and stock market jumps and with others. And in recent years, since the pandemic struck, we've been studying the rise of work from home and its implications. And I tried to count up the number of collaborators we have in the various projects, and it's more than a dozen. I couldn't figure out exactly how many we had.
So also on that same front, along with Jose Maria Barrero and others, we conduct the US. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, that's monthly, and the Global Survey of Working Arrangements with a larger team that's roughly at an annual frequency. So audience members can find survey results and sign up for our monthly newsletter at wfhresearch.com if they're interested. So that's the advert. Let me just set the stage for the discussion today. And I'll do this briefly, but I think you and I both come from a similar viewpoint on where we are and what's happening, why, and it's going to be a premise. I think for the rest of the discussion. So full days work from home as of mid 2023 or somewhere around a quarter of all paid working days among Americans 20 to 64 years old. And that screen now people who only earn like 10 or 20,000 a year. So we're screening out low wage part-time jobs in that number. That number comes from the survey of working arrangements and attitudes that we run with Jose. It's about four times the rate in 2019 Okay, so that's the big shift to work from home.
The pandemic has also triggered an innovation speed up in technologies that support remote collaboration and video conferencing and like. And that reinforces the shift to work from home.
You and I, along with folks at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, also survey business executives regularly. And in July, we asked them, what do you think is going to happen to work from home at your own company? Not in general, the macro economy, but your own company. And then we tallied up the responses and averaged them. And business executives think on average that work from home rates are actually going to go up a little bit over the next five years. So that's kind of, I think, some factual background.
You and I have written at length about how the big shift to work from home came about, why it will stick. For today's conversation, let's just take it for granted that work from home is here to stay. There are profound implications for the economy and society. And I want to focus today's discussion on the productivity implications.
So Nick, you are one of the world's leading experts on this topic. In fact, you wrote a major study on the topic years before the pandemic, titled, Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. And that paper appeared in the quarterly Journal of Economics. So tell us, Nick, how this study came about. Not many people were thinking about work from home before the pandemic, why you wrote this study and what you learned from it.

**Nick Bloom** (4:14)
Great, so the study came about in all honesty from a piece of good fortune. So James Liang, who was the founding CEO and at that point, chairman of C-Trip, happened to be sitting in my class. This is very Stanford. I had somebody who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars quietly sitting in the back of the class.
I'd actually done some work on work from home back in 2005 So I'd long been interested. One of four kids, both my parents work full time for the British government. They used to work from home sporadically when there were like child care disasters in the 80s. So I'm 50, so I was like, I'm in the 80s there. I mean, it was horrible back then. It was the shuffling pieces of papers before the era of the personal computer.