Planned analysis
This is the programme’s capstone, and it is scoped rather than estimated. There are no results to show yet; this page sets out the question, the data it needs, and what the answer would look like.
The thesis in one line is that remote work is a single labour-market shock with two opposite welfare consequences, and that housing-supply elasticity governs the balance between them. When people can live apart from where they work, the economy can place labour where it is most productive, an efficiency gain. The same relocation bids up housing costs on the incumbents who cannot move, most sharply the non-teleworkable renters, a regressive equity cost. Where new homes can be built, the shock is absorbed in quantity and the efficiency gain is realised with little displacement. Where supply is fixed, it is absorbed in price, and the equity cost dominates. One mechanism, two consequences, one lever.
To turn the schematic into numbers, the plan is a quantitative spatial general-equilibrium model calibrated to the elasticities estimated in the earlier stages, with a sufficient-statistics welfare accounting that reports the aggregate efficiency gain net of the regressive incidence, and an equivalent variation by household type, tenure, and place. The binding inputs still to be acquired are a housing-supply elasticity for each area and a teleworkability measure built from occupation mix. Counterfactuals would then ask what a more elastic supply in the receiving areas would buy: more of the efficiency realised, less of the displacement.