Davide Rigo

Prevalence of Working from Home

COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the uptake of work-from-home (WFH) practices worldwide. In a recent project, Davide Rigo employs a difference-in-differences framework and an instrumental variable approach to examine the performance of Italian firms before and after the COVID-19 pandemic onset. By comparing firms that adopted WFH practices during the 2020 lockdowns with those that did not, he finds an uneven impact on firms, with smaller firms that experienced negative growth rates. Conversely, firms with prior investments in information and communication technologies demonstrated greater efficacy in transitioning to fully remote work.

Mr. Rigo’s main research interests lie at the intersection of Economic Geography and International Economics, with a particular focus on the role of innovation and digitalization in firms’ growth dynamics as well as on studying firms’ internationalization strategies and their impact on regional development. He is currently working on a three-year (2023–25) research project at LSE on the impact of remote work on the geography of workers, firms and innovation. Using confidential administrative firm-level data from France and Italy, Mr. Rigo is studying the role of the recent WFH revolution in affecting firms’ performance, knowledge creation and agglomeration forces.

Davide Rigo is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the London School of Economics. Prior to this position, Mr. Rigo worked as a Fellow in Economic Geography in the Geography and Environment Department at LSE. He holds a PhD in International Economics from the Graduate Institute in Geneva and an MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. Mr. Rigo has also collaborated as a consultant with the OECD and UNCTAD in projects focused on global value chains, multinational enterprises and economic development.