About

Nicholas Bloom is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow of SIEPR, and the Co-Director of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK Treasury and McKinsey & Company. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of several awards including the Alfred Sloan Fellowship, the Bernacer Prize, the European Investment Bank Prize, the Frisch Medal, the Kauffman Medal, and a National Science Foundation Career Award. Bloom holds a BA from Cambridge, an MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London. His work and expertise include remote work, hybrid work schedules, and workplace management, and he is recognized for his contributions to understanding the future of work and economic uncertainty.

Research topics

• Economics
• Monetary economics
• Business
• Finance
• Geography
• Virology
• Medicine
• Financial economics
• Management
• Macroeconomics
• Engineering
• Operations management
• Mechanical engineering
• Psychology
• Demographic economics
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• <i>Wonder city: How to reclaim human-scale urban life</i> , by Lynn Ellsworth

  Journal of Urban Affairs · 2026-03-10

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Remote Work, Employee Mix, and Performance

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-05-01 · 6 citations

  reportOpen access

  We study the shift to fully remote work at a large call center in Turkey, highlighting three findings.First, fully remote work increased the share of women, including married women, rural and smaller-town residents.By accessing groups with traditionally lower labor-force participation the firm was able to increase its share of graduate employees by 14% without raising wages.Second, workforce productivity rose by 10%, reflecting shorter call durations for remote employees.This was facilitated by a quieter home working environment, avoiding the background noise in the office.Third, fully remote employees with initial in-person training saw higher long-run remote productivity and lower attrition rates.This underscores the advantages of initial in-person onboarding for fully remote employees.

  PublisherDOI

• The New Geography of Labor Markets

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-03-01 · 7 citations

  reportOpen access

  We study where Americans live in relation to their employer's worksite using matched employeremployee data, and how that relationship changes with the rise of work from home (WFH).Mean distance from home to employer's worksite rose more than 70% between 2019 and 2024 in our dataset.Twelve percent of employees hired after March 2020 reside fifty or more miles from their employer by 2024, triple the pre-pandemic share.Distance to employer rose most for those in their 30s and 40s, among highly paid employees, and in Finance, Information, and Professional Services.Especially for the affluent, the pandemic-instigated rise in WFH initiated a multi-year pattern of net migration to areas with cheaper housing and states with lower tax rates.Finally, we show that distant employees exhibit more sensitivity to firm-level adjustments on hiring and separation margins.These developments have implications for residential location, state-level tax revenues, labor markets, and household welfare.

  PublisherDOI

• How Do Chief Executive Officers Make Strategy?

  Management Science · 2025-09-26 · 1 citations

  article

  We survey 262 chief executive officer (CEO) alumni of Harvard Business School and gather evidence on three aspects of each executive’s strategy practice: how formalized it is, how it is developed, and how it is implemented. We report three main results. First, firms with higher adoption of structured strategy practices outperform their peers; they grow faster and are more profitable, especially in industries with greater strategic complexity. Second, the appointment of CEOs with more structured styles appears to drive this outperformance, not firm-specific effects. This raises the question of how an executive comes to adopt more structured strategy practices. Our third finding provides a partial answer; business education can have a lasting impact on a CEO’s strategy practices as evidenced by a regression discontinuity analysis centered around a curriculum change at Harvard Business School. This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy. Funding: Financial support was provided by Harvard Business School. M.-J. Yang acknowledges financial support provided by the Leeds School of Business. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03924 .

  PublisherDOI

• Management and Firm Dynamism

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The global persistence of work from home

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-07-03 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  Work from home (WFH) surged worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, then partially receded as the pandemic subsided. Using our Global Survey of Working Arrangements covering dozens of countries, we find that average WFH rates among college-educated employees stabilized after 2022. The average number of WFH days per week is steady at roughly 1 d per week globally from 2023 through early 2025. Cross-country variation persists: WFH is about twice as common in advanced English-speaking economies as in much of Asia. These results show how the pandemic-driven shift to remote work has persisted and reached a new equilibrium with implications for urban economies, workforce flexibility, and future research on labor markets.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Management and Firm Dynamism

  Staff reports · 2025-07-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings, and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and improve the performance of the plants they acquire. To explain these findings, we build a model with two key elements. First, management is a combination of firm-level management ability (e.g. CEO quality), which can be transferred to all plants, and plant-level management practices, which can be changed through intangible investment (e.g. consulting or training). Second, management both raises productivity and also reduces the operational costs of dynamism: buying, selling, opening, and closing plants. We structurally estimate the model on Census microdata, fitting our key dynamic moments, and then use it to establish three additional results. First, mergers and acquisitions raise economy-wide management and productivity by reallocating plants to firms with higher management ability. Banning M&amp;A would depress GDP and management by about 15 percent. Second, greater product market competition improves both management and productivity by reallocating away from badly managed plants. Finally, management practices account for about a fifth of the cross-country productivity differences with the U.S.

  PublisherDOI

• Tapping Business and Household Surveys to Sharpen Our View of Work from Home

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-06-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  Timely business-level measures of work from home (WFH) are scarce for the U.S. economy.We review prior survey-based efforts to quantify the incidence and character of WFH and describe new questions that we developed and fielded for the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS).Drawing on more than 150,000 firm-level responses to the BTOS, we obtain four main findings.First, nearly a third of businesses have employees who work from home, with tremendous variation across sectors.The share of businesses with WFH employees is nearly ten times larger in the Information sector than in Accommodation and Food Services.Second, employees work from home about 1 day per week, on average, and businesses expect similar WFH levels in five years.Third, feasibility aside, businesses' largest concern with WFH relates to productivity.Seven percent of businesses find that onsite work is more productive, while two percent find that WFH is more productive.Fourth, there is a low level of tracking and monitoring of WFH activities, with 70% of firms reporting they do not track employee days in the office and 75% reporting they do not monitor employees when they work from home.These lessons serve as a starting point for enhancing WFH-related content in the American Community Survey and other household surveys.

  PublisherDOI

• Remote Work, Employee Mix, and Performance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Economic Impact of Brexit

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-11-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines the impact of the UK's decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016.Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey.These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time.We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%.These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process.Comparing these with contemporary forecasts -providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning microliterature of social science predictions -shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: A Micro to Macro Analysis of Productivity and Growth

  NSF · $403k · 2009–2015

• Economic Policy Uncertainty: Public Data and Research

  NSF · $565k · 2013–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Steven J. Davis

  Hoover Institution

  501 shared

• John Van Reenen

  426 shared

• Raffaella Sadun

  Harvard University

  209 shared

• Jose Maria Barrero

  176 shared

• Josh Lerner

  Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

  171 shared

• Tarek A. Hassan

  158 shared

• Ahmed Tahoun

  152 shared

• Aakash Kalyani

  152 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Stanford University

• M.A.

  University of Oxford

• B.A.

  University of Cambridge

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Alfred Sloan Fellowship
• Bernacer Prize
• European Investment Bank Prize
• Frisch Medal