The Great Reshuffle: Remote Work and Residential Sorting

This paper studies the significance of migration in evaluating the welfare impacts of remote work. By analyzing individual location history data, we first document an increase in net migration towards suburbs and smaller cities in the US since 2020. We demonstrate that the migration wave has been disproportionately fueled by high-income individuals, who were more likely to move due to remote work. Consequently, regions with substantial in-migration observed the greatest rise in housing expenses. This also led to changes in local demand for services and associated employment. Employing a stylized welfare accounting framework, we show that migration mitigated the increase in housing cost burdens for both high- and low-income groups, with the advantages being greater for low-income individuals. Conversely, dispersed job growth, as a result of migration away from major urban centers, curtailed the increase in job accessibility, especially for high-income groups. Factoring in the spatial impacts of migration on housing costs and job accessibility, the welfare inequality surge related to remote work is considerably tempered.