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Return to Office and the Tenure Distribution

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  • David Van Dijcke
  • Florian Gunsilius
  • Austin Wright

Abstract

With the official end of the COVID-19 pandemic, debates about the return to office have taken center stage among companies and employees. Despite their ubiquity, the economic implications of return to office policies are not fully understood. Using 260 million resumes matched to company data, we analyze the causal effects of such policies on employees' tenure and seniority levels at three of the largest US tech companies: Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple. Our estimation procedure is nonparametric and captures the full heterogeneity of tenure and seniority of employees in a distributional synthetic controls framework. We estimate a reduction in counterfactual tenure that increases for employees with longer tenure. Similarly, we document a leftward shift in the seniority distribution towards positions below the senior level. These shifts appear to be driven by employees leaving to larger firms that are direct competitors. Our results suggest that return to office policies can lead to an outflow of senior employees, posing a potential threat to the productivity, innovation, and competitiveness of the wider firm.

Suggested Citation

  • David Van Dijcke & Florian Gunsilius & Austin Wright, 2024. "Return to Office and the Tenure Distribution," Papers 2405.04352, arXiv.org.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2405.04352
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    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.04352
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Jan Eeckhout & Philipp Kircher & Cristina Lafuente & Gabriele Macci, 2021. "Corrigendum to Capital Investment in “Assortative Matching With Large Firms”," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(4), pages 11-14, July.
    2. Natalia Emanuel & Emma Harrington & Amanda Pallais, 2023. "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?," NBER Working Papers 31880, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Robert D. Metcalfe & Alexandre B. Sollaci & Chad Syverson, 2023. "Managers and Productivity in Retail," NBER Working Papers 31192, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Nicholas Bloom & Ruobing Han & James Liang, 2022. "How Hybrid Working From Home Works Out," NBER Working Papers 30292, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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    Cited by:

    1. Chiara Costi & Andrew Clark & Conchita D'Ambrosio & Anthony Lepinteur & Giorgia Menta, 2024. "Return-to-Office Mandates, Health and Well-being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment," LISER Working Paper Series 2024-07, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER).
    2. Florian F Gunsilius, 2025. "A primer on optimal transport for causal inference with observational data," Papers 2503.07811, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2025.

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