'Remote work across jobs, companies, and space' with Dr Bledi Taska

Past Event

Date
 10 May 2023, 12:30pm - 1:30pm

Location
 Oxford Martin School & Online
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD

Event Recording:

The COVID-19 pandemic propelled an enormous uptake in hybrid and fully remote work.

Over time, it has become clear that this shift will endure long after the initial mandatory event. US survey data indicate that a quarter of workdays will happen at home or other remote locations, five times the pre-pandemic rate. This large and enduring increase in remote work is evident in dozens of other countries beyond the US. There are few, if any, modern precedents for such an abrupt, large-scale shift in working arrangements.

Using the data captured from more than 250 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries for the paper Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space, Bledi Taska, Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change, will discuss the recent trends in remote work. The findings show that since 2019, job postings for fully or partly remote roles rose more than three-fold in the US and by a factor of five or more in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK.

How does this new phenomenon differ between countries, cities and types of jobs? What does this mean for the future of work?

Bledi Taska Headshot Small

Dr Bledi Taska
Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change

Bledi Taska is the Executive Vice President and Chief Economist at Lightcast. He is a labour economist specialising in the application of econometrics and data science methods on real-time labour market data. At Lightcast Bledi leads a team of economists and data scientists, which supports the company’s public policy research, product development, and collaboration with academic researchers and international organisations.

Current projects involve topics around skills mismatch and labour shortages, the future of skills, the effect of automation, and reskilling of workers based on skill adjacencies.

Bledi’s work at Lightcast has been published or featured in several popular media outlets from all over the world, such as the Australian Financial Review, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist, France 24, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Bledi holds a doctorate degree in economics from New York University with a concentration in labour and education economics and a master’s and bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Athens, Greece. His academic work has been published in leading academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Research Policy, and Labour Economics.