Access, selection, and the same word: remote work

The two studies appear to disagree only if “remote work” is treated as one exposure with one outcome. This chapter aligns them across treatment, unit, timing, and estimand, then uses that alignment to answer a practical question: when does a remote option change a worker’s career access, and when does a wage gap mainly describe who receives the option? The result is not a universal winner between remote and office work, but a way to make conditional judgments about workers, employers, and policy.

The same label hides different questions

The U.S. study begins with an employer-side opportunity. A job entry is classified as remote-eligible when matched postings from the destination employer, occupation, country, and location show that at least half offer some form of remote work. The study then follows the change from the worker’s previous job to the destination job and examines wage growth, upward seniority, cross-metropolitan movement, employer size, and employer prestige.

The French study begins with a worker’s reported behavior. An employee counts as working from home if they report doing so during the previous four weeks. The outcome is hourly wage level, first compared across workers and then compared after controls for occupation, place, worker characteristics, firm characteristics, prior wages, and worker effects. The study also checks wage growth, but its central result concerns why WFH workers earn more at a point in time.

Those are different treatments. Employer-side eligibility is a condition attached to an opportunity before the worker enters. Worker-reported WFH is a condition observed after or during employment. One can affect who is able to match with an employer; the other describes who actually uses or obtains a work arrangement. A job may be eligible but used mostly on site. A worker may work at home occasionally in a role that was not classified as a broadly remote-eligible opportunity. Neither measure is a perfect substitute for the other.

The units differ too. The U.S. unit is a job-entry event, so its comparison is between transitions. The French unit is an employee observation in a labor-force survey linked to an employer, so its comparison is between workers’ wage levels. A transition estimate asks whether the step from one job to the next differs. A level estimate asks whether one group stands higher on the wage ladder. A group can start higher and then grow at the same rate, producing a wage-level premium without a wage-growth premium.

The timing makes the distinction especially clear. The U.S. treatment is measured around the entry into the new job, using employer postings in a pre-entry window. The French study observes WFH in the post-pandemic period and uses wages from 2018 and 2019 to test whether those who work from home were already different before the arrangement became widespread. The first design asks what kind of opportunity a worker entered; the second asks whether the people who hold an arrangement had a different prior trajectory.

The estimands therefore answer different counterfactual questions.