With the official end of the COVID-19 pandemic, debates about the return to office
have taken center stage among companies and employees. Despite their ubiquity, the
economic implications of return to office policies are not fully understood. Using 260
million resumes matched to company data, we analyze the causal effects of such policies
on employees’ tenure and seniority levels at three of the largest US tech companies:
Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple. Our estimation procedure is nonparametric and captures the full heterogeneity of tenure and seniority of employees in a distributional
synthetic controls framework. We estimate a reduction in counterfactual tenure that
increases for employees with longer tenure. Similarly, we document a leftward shift in
the seniority distribution towards positions below the senior level. These shifts appear
to be driven by employees leaving to larger firms that are direct competitors. Our
results suggest that return to office policies can lead to an outflow of senior employees,
posing a potential threat to the productivity, innovation, and competitiveness of the
wider firm.
Authors
- Published in
- United States of America