Job postings that allow at least one day of remote work per week have tripled since 2019. That’s according to a working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday. The paper analyzed job postings in five English-speaking countries: the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
“The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work,” the authors concluded. Job postings offering the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week increased threefold in the U.S., and for the four other countries studied, remote-work opportunities grew approximately fivefold. The authors looked at job postings from more than 50,000 online sources, including government job boards, employer websites and job-aggregation sites. They examined over 250 million job-vacancy postings across those five countries. The researchers said they achieved “99% accuracy in flagging job postings that advertise hybrid or fully remote work.” Hybrid-work trends vary across industries, cities and occupations, the researchers found. Industries seeing a high number of remote-work posts usually require significant use of computers and include the finance, insurance, information and communications industries. Business hubs such as Chicago, London, New York, San Francisco and Toronto — which are arguably more expensive to live in than second-tier cities and their surrounding commuter belts — also had a higher share of remote-work opportu …