Working from home after COVID-19: Evidence from job postings in 20 countries

By Pawel Adrjan, Gabriele Ciminelli, Alexandre Judes, Michael Koelle, Cyrille Schwellnus, Tara Sinclair

Latest version of the paper (June 2025)

Remote work surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. To analyze its post-pandemic persistency, we construct an original dataset measuring remote and hybrid work (WFH) in 20 OECD countries and 55 occupations from January 2019 to December 2023, based on over 1 billion job postings from the global job site Indeed. The share of job postings advertising WFH more than quadrupled from about 2.5 % to around 11 % between January 2020 and January 2023 in the average country in our sample, continuing to grow even after pandemic-related restrictions were phased out. Exploiting changes in pandemic severity across countries and differences in the feasibility of remote work across occupations in a difference-in-differences design, we find that increases in pandemic severity substantially raised advertised WFH, but pandemic easing had no effect. We then use job search data to document persistently high interest in WFH from job seekers and conclude that the post-pandemic persistency of WFH may partly be a response by employers to demand for flexibility from workers.

Occupation and country level dataset (Last updated: December 2024)

Country level dataset (Last updated: December 2024)

Slides

Other publications

Unlocked Potential: Work-from-Home Job Postings in 20 OECD Countries

Adrjan, Pawel, Gabriele Ciminelli, Alexandre Judes, Michael Koelle, Cyrille Schwellnus, and Tara Sinclair. 2023. “Unlocked Potential: Work-from-Home Job Postings in 20 OECD Countries.” AEA Papers and Proceedings, 113: 604-08.

Additional links

Conference and seminar presentations

  • Banque de France and OECD Global Forum on Productivity (GFP) Workshop (Paris, Dec 2021)
  • ONS Economic Data Science Seminar (Cardiff, Jun 2022)
  • IAB/LISER Conference: Labour markets during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (Nuremberg, Oct 2022)
  • Digit Debates (Brighton, Nov 2022)
  • Asian and Australian Society of Labour Economics Annual Conference (Tokyo, Dec 2022)
  • ASSA 2023 Annual Meeting (New Orleans, Jan 2023)

Selected media coverage

Bloomberg (Dec 2021), Bloomberg (Jan 2022), Wall Street Journal, Le Figaro, BFM TV, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Irish Times, RTÉ, SVT, Economic Times