Planned analysis
This stage is scoped rather than estimated. There are no results yet; this page sets out the question, the data it needs, and what the answer would look like.
The question is whether the people who moved out of expensive cities after 2020 kept their city jobs. If they did, remote work has loosened a long-standing constraint: the best-paid, most productive work no longer requires living in the most expensive places, so labour can sit where housing is affordable while staying matched to where it is most valuable. That is the efficiency half of the capstone. It matters because it is the counterweight to the housing-cost harm: the same relocation that raises rents on incumbents can, if the productive match survives the move, also raise output. Whether the net effect is worth having depends on both halves being measured, not just the visible cost.
To answer it, the plan pairs the Census 2021 workplace and working-from-home tables, which show where people live against where they work, with the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which follows the same people over time so a mover’s wage and commute can be tracked before and after. The test is an event study of movers: does the wage hold while the commute lengthens and housing cost falls, and do receiving areas gain through local spending. The Census tables are public; the longitudinal microdata are held under secure access and have a long lead time, which is why this stage sits toward the end of the programme.