It’s something you hear people muse on often. Wow, as bad as the coronavirus pandemic has been for lives and livelihoods, imagine if it had hit 30 years ago, or even 10. At least we have the technology that means some people can work from home, saving lives and keeping parts of the economy going that could otherwise have failed. One set of academics took this beyond idle speculation. They created a model that used data to estimate how prevalent working from home would have been if the pandemic had hit in 1990, the impact on workforce productivity, how this might have affected commercial real estate rents and the wider impact on society. 
The counterfactual was part of a wider paper produced by Rutgers Business School professor Morris Davis, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill associate professor Andra Ghent and University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor Jesse Gregory that looked at…  Read the full story here. | 
