IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/luc/wpaper/22-15.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Zoom City: Working From Home, Urban Productivity and Land Use

Author

Listed:
  • Efthymia Kyriakoupoulou

    (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)

  • Pierre Picard

    (Université du Luxembourg)

Abstract

Who will benefit and who will lose from a permanent increase in working from home (WFH)? This paper investigates the impact of WFH on cities of different sizes, highlights the dangers of too much WFH, and discusses aspects of the disagreement between workers and firms. Our results suggest that WFH raises urban productivity and average wages only in large cities. We also study the optimal fraction of WFH and show that workers-residents have incentives to adopt an inefficiently high WFH scheme. The implementation of remote work in the short run - at fixed rents and wages - implies higher benefits for long-distance commuters and lower benefits or even losses for short-distance ones. It also implies benefits for some firms and losses for others, which potentially explains the low prevalence of WFH before the pandemic. Finally, we show that advances in digital technology, which increase the productivity of remote workers, lead to increased welfare benefits. A calibration exercise for the average and the largest European capital cities sheds more light on the impact of WFH on cities of different sizes.

Suggested Citation

  • Efthymia Kyriakoupoulou & Pierre Picard, 2022. "The Zoom City: Working From Home, Urban Productivity and Land Use," DEM Discussion Paper Series 22-15, Department of Economics at the University of Luxembourg.
  • Handle: RePEc:luc:wpaper:22-15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10993/52958
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kazufumi Tsuboi, 2022. "Shifting to Telework and Firms' Location: Does Telework Make Our Society Efficient?," Papers 2212.00934, arXiv.org.
    2. Steven Bond-Smith & Philip McCann, 2022. "The work-from-home revolution and the performance of cities," Working Papers 2022-6, University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
    3. Jinwon Kim & Dede Long, 2022. "What Flattened the House-Price Gradient? The Role of Work-from-Home and Decreased Commuting Cost," Working Papers 2205, Nam Duck-Woo Economic Research Institute, Sogang University (Former Research Institute for Market Economy).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Working from home; urban structure; commuting; remote work; land use.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)
    • R14 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns
    • R21 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Housing Demand
    • R49 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - Other
    • J81 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Standards - - - Working Conditions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:luc:wpaper:22-15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Marina Legrand (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crcrplu.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.