The Covid-19 crisis and restrictions on mobility have forced a significant part of the labour force to work remotely over the last year, accelerating the trend towards working from home. An increasing number of employees see benefits in this working style, and improvements in productivity have also been reported. Meanwhile, the response from employers has been varied, with some of them calling for a prompt return to the office, and others providing the flexibility of a hybrid work approach, or even allowing their employees to work from anywhere in the world. So what will the future of work look like after Covid-19?

In this seminar, chaired by Linda Yueh, the speakers will analyse the current situation, the challenges, and the future of work, based on their own empirical research.

About the Speakers:

Linda Yueh (chair) is fellow in economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, and adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School. She is also visiting professor at LSE IDEAS and chair of the LSE Economic Diplomacy Commission. She is widely published and is editor of the Routledge Series on Economic Growth and Development. Her latest book The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today was The Times’s Best Business Books of the Year, and Newsweek magazine’s Best Books of the Year.

Nick Bloom is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He has been researching working from home for almost 20 years. He has been heavily involved with policy, including meeting President Obama, and speaking in the 2014 Working Families Summit at which Presidents Obama and Biden also spoke. He gave a 2017 TedX talk on working from home, has consulted with 100s of CEOs and managers, and has been covered extensively in national and international media.

Daiji Kawaguchi is a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Tokyo. Kawaguchi is also a Program Director at Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry. His main research interests are on explaining the evolution of wage inequality in Japan, on examining the impact of new technology on employment, and on examining the monopsony in the labour market. Kawaguchi graduated from Waseda University (B.A., 1994), Hitotsubashi University, (M.A., 1996) and Michigan State University (Ph.D., 2002). Before joining University of Tokyo faculty in 2016, Kawaguchi was Assistant Professor of Economics at Osaka University (2002-03) and University of Tsukuba (2003-05), and Associate and full Professor at Hitotsubashi University (2005-2016).