This stage asks who bears the housing cost of remote work. It is preliminary: the descriptive listing-text signal is in hand, while the inputs for the causal incidence estimate are still being acquired.
Variables
- Occupation teleworkability (pending): the share of an area’s jobs that can be done from home, built from a national teleworkability score applied to the local occupation mix.
- Local housing-supply elasticity (pending): how readily an area builds new homes in response to demand, the moderator that turns a demand shock into either quantity or price.
- Census tenure (pending): the share of households renting privately, the group most exposed to the incidence.
- Listing-text cues (available): the share of listings whose text mentions working from home, an office or study, a garden office, or broadband, a descriptive proxy for the demand shift.
Data source
For the descriptive cues, a text scan of the Rightmove listings, several million per year. For the causal incidence, the intended sources are a teleworkability score (Dingel and Neiman) applied to Census 2021 occupation counts, a housing-supply elasticity in the manner of Hilber and Vermeulen, and Census 2021 tenure tables. The latter three are external and not yet acquired.
Summary statistics of the analysis variables
The observed listing-text cues below are the descriptive inputs in hand now, each the share of listings whose text carries the feature. The further inputs the causal incidence study needs, occupation teleworkability, a local housing-supply elasticity, and Census 2021 tenure, are external and not yet acquired, so their statistics are pending.
| Variable | Role | Mean | SD | Minimum | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| “Work from home” mentioned | input | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% | 0.4% |
| Office or study room mentioned | input | 1.5% | 0.4% | 1.0% | 2.1% |
| Garden office mentioned | input | 1.0% | 0.6% | 0.3% | 1.8% |
| Broadband or connectivity mentioned | input | 0.3% | 0.3% | 0.0% | 0.8% |
Grain: share of all listings in a year (both tenures pooled), 2015 to 2025.
Method
Planned: a shift-share exposure design in which teleworkable inflow, interacted with the destination’s supply elasticity, is related to rents and prices, with the incidence expressed as a money-metric transfer onto non-teleworkable incumbent renters. The descriptive text signal motivates the design but does not identify the effect.