https://macropaperwarehouse.com/authors/charly-porcher/Charly PorcherHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usThu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/remote-work-and-city-structure/Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/remote-work-and-city-structure/<p>Monte, Porcher, and Rossi-Hansberg ask why remote work surged abruptly and permanently after COVID-19 despite information-technology advances raising it only marginally between 1980 and 2019, why the change was so heterogeneous across cities, and what the welfare consequences are. Their answer is a coordination mechanism: working downtown (the CBD) yields productive interactions with other in-office workers but entails commuting/congestion costs, while remote work avoids those costs but forgoes agglomeration benefits. Because workers do not internalize the spillovers they confer, a worker prefers the office only if others commute too — generating, in a dynamic discrete-choice model with idiosyncratic preferences and fixed switching costs, the possibility of MULTIPLE stationary equilibria with different permanent commuter shares. A temporary shock (the pandemic) that drives commuters near zero can then select the low-commuting equilibrium permanently.</p>