Disutility caused by remote work in urban system

Aizawa, Hiroki and Saka, Takuhiro (2024): Disutility caused by remote work in urban system.

Abstract

Remote work can affect population distribution in an urban system (i.e., a chain of cities). The current paper explores the effects of remote work on population distribution in an urban system, welfare, and utilities of workers. To examine these effects, we explore the equilibria of a New Economic Geography model that expresses remote workers. We elucidate the bifurcation mechanism of the full agglomeration in a narrow corridor with NEG models with two industries and remote work in order to investigate the effect of remote work on equilibrium. We demonstrate that the introduction of remote work can decrease the utilities of workers. We show that remote workers with myopic behavior themselves decrease their own utilities. With myopic behavior, it is not necessarily ensured that remote workers can obtain higher utilities compared to those with population distribution before the introduction of remote work.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Agglomeration; Bifurcation; Economic geography; Remote work; Welfare
• Subjects: R - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics > R1 - General Regional Economics > R12 - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; R - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics > R1 - General Regional Economics > R14 - Land Use Patterns

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