S8 Ep36: Davis: Will working from home stick?

Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.  Now that many of us work part or all our week at home, does that mean we want to move to a different area, or a larger house? And what is the effect on housing for those who cannot work from home? Morgane Richard of Stanford has researched how Londoners sought out new homes post-Covid to match their flexible work arrangements. She tells Tim Phillips what her models tell us about the long-run impact of their new working lives on house prices and rents for everyone living in, and on the edge of, the city.

Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.  Go back six or seven years and working from home was an exception. Bosses discouraged it, contracts didn’t mention it, and we didn’t have the technology to do it.  Covid changed all that. But since then, how have work patterns changed? Should we believe the press reports that we’re all being summoned back to the office, or is remote work now part of our lives – and what does that mean for employers and employees? Steve Davis of the Hoover Institution and SIEPR has been measuring the evolution of flexible working since the pandemic. He spoke to Tim Phillips about the far-off times when little work was done at home, who is taking advantage of the change in the way we work, and who benefited most from the Great Resignation and the changes in hiring and outsourcing that followed it. 

If we focus on the cutting edge of AI implementation, we’re also focusing on a small set of technologically advanced countries. How will AI affect work in the rest of the world, what should those countries do to prepare, and how can they make best use of the technology? Giovanni Melina of the IMF is one of the authors of two papers that calculates both the exposure of jobs to AI around the world, and the readiness of those countries to meet the challenge of using AI effectively at work.  He talks to Tim Phillips about the extent of the exposure to AI in emerging markets and developing countries, whether those countries have the infrastructure to implement applications of the technology, and the policies that would be most effective to increase their preparedness. 

 In the second of special series recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025, we are asking, how good is AI at doing real-world job task? And how can we measure their capability without resorting to technical benchmarks that may not mean much in the workplace? Since we all became aware of large language models, LLMs scientists have been attempting to evaluate how good they are at performing expert tasks. The results of those tests can show us whether LLMs  can be useful complements to our work, or even replacements for us, as many fear. But setting or grading a test to decide whether an LLM can do a problem-solving job task, rather than solve an abstract problem, isn't easy to do.  Maria del Rio-Chanona, a computer scientist at UCL, tells Tim Phillips about her innovative work-in-progress, in which she asks an LLM to set a tricky workplace exam, then tells another LLM to take the test – which a third LLM evaluates.

Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.  This year the annual Paris School of Economics-PSE Policy Forum is organized around three themes: artificial intelligence and labour reallocation, working conditions and remote work, and inequality in the workplace. In short, what's work going to look like in the future?  Our series of podcasts, recorded live at the event, starts with David Autor’s work on the impact of AI on jobs. Rather than speculate about how soon AI will destroy work, David’s research focuses on which tasks AI will automate, and what that means in terms of the expertise needed to do these jobs in the future. He tells Tim Phillips that some jobs will become more expert and some less – but the employment effects of AI may be the opposite of what many people expect. 

The Bank for International Settlements Annual Economic Report has just dropped, and there’s a markedly less positive tone than last year, when it was celebrating imminent soft landings in the global economy. It warns of a deteriorating outlook for growth, coupled with vulnerabilities in the global financial system.  So, what exactly is the BIS worried about, how can policy and regulation respond, and should central banks start worrying about the next systemic crisis? Gaston Gelos and Frank Smets are Deputy Heads of the Monetary and Economic Department at the BIS and are also two of the authors who put together the report. They talk to Tim Phillips about why last year’s optimism has disappeared, and how monetary and fiscal policy can adjust to cope with a new era of uncertainty and fragmentation. 

Whether you are looking at the link from education to economic growth, household earnings or individual happiness, there’s no doubt that a better-educated population is good news. But how can policy improve education in a cost-effective way? You might assume that a good route would be to improve the management of schools, but existing research is not conclusive, and often top-down attempts to improve management meets opposition from administrators. An experiment in Brazil has evaluated a program to improve management using existing resources in Rio de Janeiro. Tiago Cavalcanti, of University of Cambridge, Sao Paulo School of Economics & CEPR, and Felipe Puccioni of the Court of Accounts of Rio de Janeiro came up with the experiment, and they tell Tim Phillips about why universal education doesn’t necessarily mean universal learning – and how they became celebrities on national television when their successful project hit the headlines.

Pedestrianised areas, car-free streets, or low traffic neighbourhoods are increasingly visible in major cities. Whether in London, Paris, New York or Barcelona, these changes are always controversial – but does the loud criticism that we often hear in social media or newspapers really represent the views of voters who are affected by these policies? Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal of the Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona Institute of Economics and CEPR spoke to Tim Phillips about whether Barcelona’s car-free “Superblocks” were vote-winners or vote-losers for the city’s mayor. Photo: Cataleirxs

What’s the point of having a job? Clearly, to make money for ourselves and our families. But is it possible for us to discover some bigger purpose or meaning at work. And, if we do, who benefits? That’s the idea that a multinational organisation had when it called in a team of economists to analyse its internal programme called “Find your Purpose” (FYP). The resulting RCT set out to measure whether FYP changed how employees behaved at work, whether it helped them enjoy their jobs, and whether it increased profits too. Oriana Bandiera of London School of Economics and CEPR was one of those economists. She tells Tim Phillips how she took the programme and found her purpose, why FYP increased the quit rate but improved productivity, and why employees who took the programme stopped worrying about their work-life balance. 

Does the public take more notice of the opinions of male or female economists? We know that female experts, whether in science, politics or the media, suffer from an authority gap: their expertise is often not given as much weight by the public as opinions held by less qualified men. But does the gap persist for the very highest achievers? And, if it closes or even reverses for them, what lessons are there for other female experts?  Sarah Smith of the University of Bristol and CEPR recently conducted an experiment about which expert economists are most likely to influence public opinion. She tells Tim Phillips about a signal that reverses the authority gap, and how this insight can help other female economists to communicate their expertise.