Work from Home and Disability Employment

Abstract

There has been a dramatic rise in disability employment since the pandemic, while work from home (WFH) has risen fourfold. This paper asks whether the two are causally related. Controlling for compositional changes and labor market tightness, a 1 percentage point increase in WFH increases full-time employment by 1.0 percent for individuals with a physical disability. The postpandemic increase in working from home explains 68-85 percent of the rise in full-time employment. Wage data suggest that WFH increased the supply of workers with a physical disability, likely by reducing commuting costs and enabling better control of working conditions.

The authors' own abstract, copied from aeaweb.org.

How to cite it

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Bloom, N., Dahl, G. B., & Rooth, D. (2026). Work from Home and Disability Employment. American Economic Review: Insights. https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20240538

Bloom, Nicholas, et al. "Work from Home and Disability Employment." American Economic Review: Insights, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20240538.

@article{bloom2026work,
  title = {Work from Home and Disability Employment},
  author = {Nicholas Bloom and Gordon B. Dahl and Dan-Olof Rooth},
  journal = {American Economic Review: Insights},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20240538},
}

What it is

Nicholas Bloom, Gordon B. Dahl and Dan-Olof Rooth study whether the rise in remote work explains the recent jump in employment among people with disabilities (American Economic Review: Insights, June 2026).

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