The Biggest Winners and Losers From the Work-From-Home Revolution

The fivefold increase in working from home ushered in by the pandemic is perhaps the largest change to hit U.S. labor markets since World War II. It has touched just about every manager in America, reshaped industries including real estate and business travel, and led to an exodus from city centres to the suburbs.

And working from home is here to stay—at least in a hybrid model where a commute to the office is limited to just a few days each week. Tracking detailed survey data, we see working-from-home levels were rapidly dropping from 2020 to 2022. But by early 2023 they stabilised and have remained flat ever since. Hybrid working has become the new normal for millions of professionals and managers across America.

So, it’s time to tally up the impact. Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, who are the biggest winners and losers from the work-from-home revolution?

Start with the losers

The biggest losers are likely city-centre office and retail property owners. The massive shift to home working has created a doughnut effect in major cities around the world. Millions of employees are no longer commuting every day, leaving many offices half-filled and retail stores struggling for customers. The owners of this real estate—often pension funds, family firms and endowments—have collectively lost hundreds of billions of dollars of investments.

In the long run, the sector will slowly recover as supply contracts. New construction has slowed, some empty buildings are slowly being converted to residential accommodation, and some lower-quality offices will be torn down. But recovery will take years to complete. Winter has come for the office sector. One forecast that a major leasing company shared with me was it would take until 2033 for occupancy to recover to pre pandemic levels in San Francisco—perhaps the hardest hit city.

Another loser has been mass-transit rail systems. Ridership has dropped by 30% nationally as commuters shift from a five-day commuting schedule to two or three days a week. These commuter rail systems have high fixed costs due to inflexible track and train costs, alongside rigid union-controlled labor expenses.

Large drops in ridership revenue translate into larger budget deficits. To date these deficits have been bailed out by pandemic-era federal and state subsidies. But the fear is unless public transit costs can be right-sized, once these subsidies run out they will see devastating service cuts or outright closure.

Growing up in Britain, I heard about the infamous Beeching cuts of the 1960s, which cut station numbers by 55% and devastated rail travel. I fear something similar happening to U.S. transit for 2024 and beyond unless operators and unions can align cost with revenues.

The third big loser has been big cities. American cities occupy surprisingly small spaces. For example, San Francisco is less than 50 square miles, comprising just the tip of a peninsula. So, when city-centre residents fled for the suburbs, they took their tax dollars with them.

As we know from the experience of New York in the 1970s, cities can adjust by cutting expenditures. But this will be painful and risks a hollowing out of city centers if key services like police and education are cut. Indeed, bond markets have already cut the prices of many city municipal bonds, providing an ominous signal of the budgetary struggles ahead.

But there are winners

It isn’t all gloomy, particularly for the biggest work-from-home winners: the workers. In national surveys, employees report they value the ability to work from home two or three days a week as much as an 8% pay increase. Multiplied across the roughly 70 million Americans who are currently working from home, this is a perk valued at roughly $500 billion a year. This vast dividend has benefited employees through less commuting and lower stress, alongside more personal, leisure and family time.

One recent study highlighted how the typical U.S. home-working employee spends 40 minutes more a week on child care from the time saved from avoiding the daily commute. This will have longer-run effects ranging from higher labor-force participation rates—possibly pushing up growth rates—to potentially even a fertility dividend as parenting becomes somewhat easier.

Another winner is the environment, thanks to reduced travel and energy needs. A recent study found working from home two days a week reduces pollution by about 15%. This comes from lower commuting emissions alongside additional savings from lower office energy bills. A double dividend is the reduced congestion on emptier roads, with traffic speed data from Inryx suggesting the morning commute is 10% faster.

And perhaps the biggest work-from-home winner are companies. Research finds that hybrid working three days a week in the office has a net neutral on employee productivity, while allowing firms to save on recruitment and retention costs. Firms can save money by trimming office expenses while using remote working to lower labour costs by hiring employees outside major cities.

U.S. firms made about $1 trillion higher profits in 2022 than in 2019, an increase of almost 50%. While many factors likely contributed to this, including the strong economic growth, it is notable this happened alongside the fivefold surge in working from home. Indeed, the mass adoption of hybrid working by millions of firms across the U.S. and Europe is perhaps the strongest evidence of its positive impact on profitability.

Looking further out, the biggest change will almost surely come from the new technologies we use to work remotely. When I first started working in the 1990s, working remotely meant conference calls and emailing files. Now we telecommute and share files on cloud networks.

The future likely heralds similarly large changes. In discussions with startups and tech firms, I hear about systems for holographic meetings, wall-size screens and global connectivity. This technology means working from home hasn’t just stabilised but is now moving into its longer-run phase of expansion. Ten years from now we will look back at 2023 as the beginning of the long bull market in hybrid working.

Nicholas Bloom is a professor of economics at Stanford University.

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

The Biggest Winners and Losers From the Work-From-Home Revolution

Remote or hybrid work has become the new normal for millions of people. We are only just starting to see the impact.

Start with the losers

But there are winners

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.