Is remote work in high demand? Evidence from job postings during COVID-19 Jose Morales-Arilla ∗ Harvard University Somerville, Massachusetts, USA jrm488@g.harvard.edu Carlos Daboín Consultant at The Brookings Institution Washington, D.C., USA cdaboin2@gmail.com ABSTRACT As the COVID-19 pandemic pushed frms to comply with social distancing guidelines, the relative demand for work that could be performed from home was expected to increase. However, while employment in łremotable" occupations was relatively resilient during the pandemic, online job postings -which measure demand for new hires- for these occupations dropped disproportionately. This apparent contradiction is not explained by prior job łchurning" in łnon-remotež jobs, nor by the recomposition of the labor market across economic sectors. The underperformance of postings in łremotablež jobs during the pandemic concentrates in essential occupations and occupations with high returns to experience. CCS CONCEPTS · Social and professional topics → Employment issues; Eco- nomic impact; · General and reference → Empirical studies; Estimation. KEYWORDS COVID-19, Remote work, Social distancing, Labor markets. JEL Codes: J21, J23. ACM Reference Format: Jose Morales-Arilla and Carlos Daboín. 2021. Is remote work in high de- mand? Evidence from job postings during COVID-19. In ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) (COMPASS ’21), June 28-July 2, 2021, Virtual Event, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471984 1 INTRODUCTION The nature of social distancing policies in response to COVID-19 is supposed to produce diverging outcomes for workers performing łremotablež and łnot-remotablež activities, namely those who can work from home and those who can not. Indeed, as millions of workers have started working from home, the expectation is that the demand for remotable jobs should be more resilient during the pandemic, translating into relatively less layofs and more hiring ∗ Corresponding author. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. COMPASS ’21, June 28-July 2, 2021, Virtual Event, Australia © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8453-7/21/06. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471984 eforts. Consistent with this expectation, high-teleworkability oc- cupations experienced less layofs during the frst months of the COVID-19 lockdown, highlighting potential distributional concerns around the response to the pandemic [9]. Interestingly, by mid April 2020 remotable occupations had lower numbers of layofs than non- remotable occupations, but the latter group had relatively better numbers in online vacancy postings [8]. Our paper addresses this apparent contradiction in detail. We evaluate the evolution of employment and job postings around the žremotabilityž of work in the U.S. during the pandemic up to the end of 2020. Consistent with previous fndings [8], remotable occupa- tions in the U.S. show relative resilience in employment in the frst months of the pandemic. Nevertheless, the gap in employment be- tween remotable and not-remotable occupations had largely closed by the Fall of 2020. When it comes to job postings, we fnd a much wider and sustained gap in the opposite direction. While the em- ployment outperformance of remotable occupations starts with the onset of 2020, their postings underperformance starts in April -one month after President Trump’s National Emergency declaration- and has remained relatively stable between June and December of 2020. We study a number of possible drivers behind the pattern of employment resilience with hirings erosion in remotable work un- der COVID-19. A frst potential explanation is that, as businesses started to reopen, they attempted to hire back workers for not- remotable jobs that faced the bulk of layofs at the onset of the lockdowns. However, we fnd that our results are robust to con- trolling for layofs in an occupation in recent months, suggesting that the high łchurningž of not-remotable jobs is not a likely driver behind these results. Moreover, we fnd that our estimates of the postings gap are unafected when we analyze postings data within economic sectors of the economy, suggesting that they are not the result of an industrial recomposition of the labor market during the pandemic. A key potential explanation has to do with essential activities, which rely in not-remotable tasks that must continue -or are likely to expand- during a pandemic. While essential activities explain the remotable underperformance in job postings, they do not explain their overperformance in employment. Returns to experience may also explain the divergence in employment and postings perfor- mance, as valuable experience that can be deployed at a distance may only accumulate with in-person interactions (i.e. close men- toring and supervision, building of trust and rapport, etc.), which cannot develop during lockdowns. While high returns to experience explain the employment overperformance or remotable jobs, they only partly explain their postings underperformance. Moreover, employment and hiring patterns in an occupation may depend on 27