Remote Work and Employment Dynamics under Covid-19: Evidence from Canada

Abstract

We find that 41 percent of jobs in Canada can be performed remotely, with significant variation across provinces, cities and industries. We complement this with labor micro data and document facts on the relationship between remote work feasibility and income inequality, gender, age and other worker characteristics. We then show that workers in occupations less likely to be able to work remotely experienced larger employment losses between February and March but not between March and April. This suggests that the pandemic shock hit harder and sooner those workers that could not work from home. As the crisis spread to the rest of the economy, the speed of job destruction converged across occupations, in line with occupation/sector complementarities and input-output linkages.