Jesse A. Matheson
ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher
Jesse A. Matheson, University of Sheffield, CESifo Guest from 22 to 27 January 2024
Economic Effects of Remote Working
In a recent CESifo Working Paper (9952) entitled: “How the rise of teleworking will reshape labor markets and cities,” Jesse Matheson studies how increasing the intensity of remote working affects urban labor markets and the residential structure of cities. The paper proposes a model of a monocentric city, with teleworking and different types of workers. By reducing the value that workers place on residential proximity to their workplace, teleworking reduces the price of centrally located housing relative to suburban housing and increases prices in lower-productivity cities relative to high-productivity centers. Both of these predictions are consistent with changes in UK housing prices since 2019.
Jesse Matheson works on topics in public and labor economics, with substantial intersections into health and urban economics. His previous work considers the effectiveness of public interventions that target vulnerable populations. This work includes a project, forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, in which he works with a large UK police force to run a large randomized field experiment of a domestic violence intervention.
While at CESifo, Professor Matheson will be discussing his current research agenda in which he studies the implications of remote working for the spatial organization of economic activity. This research looks at how the rise in remote working following the 2020 pandemic directly affects where millions of workers spend their daytime hours. Here he studies the implications of this spatial shift for labor markets, local businesses, residential markets and criminal activity.
Jesse Matheson is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Sheffield and has previously taught at the University of Leicester and the University of Calgary. He completed his education in Canada, receiving a BA and PhD from the University of Calgary and an MA from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He was a visiting scholar at Cornell University in 2015.
