In the paper too, but you can see it here

We have some evidence of that — remote workers tend to actually be lower productivity in their prior job, but are higher productivity at the remote firm, which is at least consistent with a good match

That doesn’t fully address your question though; but I tend to agree firms will experiment and sort themselves

The benefit we have in our design is while we measure GitHub productivity, we have variation across firms. Ie some firms have a lot of remote friendly workers; others do not, but both hire some coders.

• Remote work helps to balance the geography of innovation. If startups can hire remote workers in a range of locations, we might see a broader dispersal of innovation and other activity across metros, rather than being concentrated in a handful of cities.

Feedback welcome!

These results suggest:
• Remote work is challenging to pull off, with tradeoffs between labor market access and productivity. These tradeoffs are best managed by startups who gain a competitive edge against large firms (who are instead going RTO)

This channel of increased scale accounts for about half of the impact of remote work on productivity. The benefits are seen in the productivity rate of new hires, and also seem to spillover to other workers because existing employees also benefit when new workers join.

Why?

Hiring constraints. Startups once found it hard to compete with established incumbent firms with many offices

Remote startups increase job postings, hire more per posting, and scale faster. Remote large firms struggle with retention challenges of existing employees

Our key finding is that remote critics and boosters both have a point. Remote work increases productivity for workers at *startups* while reducing it for incumbent firms

We instrument for remote work with pre-pandemic occupational suitability for identification

Saw a red tailed hawk hunt a squirrel over Covid in Washington Square Park

I like this post by @arpitrage.bsky.social as a starting point, there are also some more technical reports from the Tax Foundation on the 1986 depreciation changes just (just Google "1986 Tax Reform Act" and "housing") arpitrage.substack.com/p/unlock-a-h...

Yes! That would be a very interesting extension.