Do Remote Workers Deter Neighborhood Crime? Evidence from the Rise of Working from Home
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Project start and end dates
May 2023 - Ongoing
Research team members
Background and aims of the project
The aim of this project is to quantify the role that the post-pandemic rise in working from home plays in the 30% decrease in burglary, relative to 2019 levels, observed for England and Wales. In doing this, we provide the first evidence of the effect of the shift to remote work on crime. We examine the impact of the rise of working from home (WFH) on neighborhood-level burglary rates, exploiting geographically granular crime data and a neighborhood WFH measure.
Methods
Quantitative data analysis (quasi-experimental design).
Key findings to date
We document three key findings:
- A one standard deviation increase in neighborhood WFH (9.5pp) leads to a persistent 4% drop in burglaries. This effect is large, explaining more than half of the 30% decrease in burglaries across England and Wales since 2019.
- This effect exhibits heterogeneity according to the remote work capacity of contiguous neighborhoods. Specifically, being surrounded by relatively high WFH neighborhoods can entirely offset the crime-reducing benefit of a given neighborhood’s WFH potential. This is consistent with the predictions of a spatial search model of criminal activity that we develop.
- We document large welfare gains to the decrease in burglary. We estimate welfare gains using a hedonic house price model. Our most conservative estimates show the welfare gains are £24.5billion (1% of 2022 UK GDP), but the true gains are likely much higher. These estimates suggest the reduction in burglaries are among the most important consequences of the rise in WFH.