Return to Office and the Tenure Distribution
Published in Conditionally Accepted: The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2025
Recommended citation: Van Dijcke, David, Florian Gunsilius, and Austin L. Wright. "Return to Office and the Tenure Distribution." University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper 2024-56 (2024). https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/return-to-office-and-the-tenure-distribution/
With the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, debates over return-to-office mandates have intensified, though their economic implications are not fully understood. Using 260 million resumes matched to company data, we analyze the impact of these policies on employee tenure and seniority at three large U.S. tech companies: Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple. Employing a distributional synthetic controls framework, for which we establish the validity of bootstrapped uniform confidence intervals, we estimate a reduction in tenure and seniority at firms returning to the office. Our findings suggest return-to-office mandates may drive senior employees to competitors, posing a risk to firm productivity and innovation.