Headline estimates for the extent of work from home (WFH) differ widely across U.S. surveys. The differences shrink greatly when we harmonize with respect to the WFH concept, target population, and question design. As of 2025, our preferred estimates say that WFH accounts for a quarter of paid workdays among Americans aged 20-64. The WFH rate is seven percentage points higher for workers with children under eight in the household and about two percentage points higher for women than men. Desired WFH rates exceed actual rates in every major demographic group – more so for women, workers with young children, and less educated workers.

We use matched employer-employee data to study where Americans live in relation to employer worksites. Mean distance from employee home to employer worksite rose from 15 miles in 2019 to 26 miles in 2023. Twelve percent of employees hired after March 2020 live at least fifty miles from their employers in 2023, triple the pre-pandemic share. Distance from employer rose more for persons in their 30s and 40s, in highly paid employees, and in Finance, Information, and Professional Services. Among persons who stay with the same employer from one year to the next, we find net migration to states with lower top tax rates and areas with cheaper housing. These migration patterns greatly intensify after the pandemic and are much stronger for high earners. Top tax rates fell 5.2 percentage points for high earners who stayed with the same employer but switched states in 2020. Finally, we show that employers treat distant employees as a more flexible margin of adjustment.

The ability to work-from-home has significantly changed the opportunities individuals have for work. WFH increases the number of jobs to which individuals can apply, the distance between individuals and employers, and the flexibility of scheduling. In addition to the direct effect, a spouse’s ability to work-from-home might affect their partner’s labor market outcomes. We leverage the panel nature of the Longitudinal Employer Household Survey (LEHD) for individual labor market statistics, and the American Business Survey’s (ABS) question on firms’ offering of work-from-home in 2019 and 2021. We investigate how an exogenous shock to a spouse’s ability to work-from-home affects a variety of individual labor market outcomes including labor force participation, relative earnings, hours worked, and the probability of switching jobs. We further explore how these effects vary by the gender of the individual who works-from-home, and how this varies over the life-cycle.

How much larger would the US economic pie be if labor market outcomes were more equitably distributed by race and ethnicity? Using data from the Current Population Survey (1990–2019), we estimate the improve- ments in labor contribution to aggregate output associated with making the outcomes for Black, Hispanic, and other minority groups at least as favorable as those for non-Hispanic white individuals in employment, hours worked, educational attainment, educational utilization, and earnings. We find significant economic gains, measured in trillions of dollars of GDP. Our results indicate that ensuring all Americans have an equitable opportunity to participate in the economy is an economically significant way to increase aggregate prosperity.

We demonstrate a methodology for replicating and projecting the path of COVID-19 using a simple epidemiology model. We fit the model to daily data on the number of infected cases in China, Italy, the United States, and Brazil. These four countries can be viewed as representing different stages, from later to earlier, of a COVID-19 epidemic cycle. We solve for a model-implied effective reproduction number R t each day so that the model closely replicates the daily number of currently infected cases in each country. For out-of-sample projections, we fit a behavioral function to the in-sample data that allows for the endogenous response of R t to movements in the lagged number of infected cases. We show that declines in measures of population mobility tend to precede declines in the model-implied reproduction numbers for each country. This pattern suggests that mandatory and voluntary stay-at-home behavior and social distancing during the early stages of the epidemic worked to reduce the effective reproduction number and mitigate the spread of COVID-19.