Did Remote Work Opportunities Unlock Full-Time Employment for Workers With Physical Disabilities After COVID-19?

Bloom, Dahl, and Rooth (2025) examine whether the post-pandemic rise in working from home causally increased employment for people with physical disabilities. They ask whether expanded access to remote work explains the sharp increase in disability employment after COVID-19. They use U.S. Current Population Survey data from 2018–2019 and 2022–2024, combined with occupation-level measures of work from home. They find that a 1 percentage point increase in work from home raises full-time employment among people with physical disabilities by about 1.0–1.3 percent. Overall, increased remote work explains roughly 68–85 percent of the post-pandemic rise in full-time disability employment.

Why This Article Was Selected for The Policy Scientist

This article addresses a policy issue of broad and durable importance: how labor market institutions and work organization affect people with disabilities. Its timing is especially salient because the post-pandemic normalization of remote work represents one of the largest exogenous shocks to job structure in decades. The CPS data are well suited to this question and remain the gold standard for U.S. disability labor statistics. The authors employ occupation-level variation and instrumental variables, offering a strong causal inference design. The methodology is rigorous and transparent.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Bloom, N., Dahl, G. B., & Rooth, D.-O. (2025). Work from home and disability employment. American Economic Review: Insights. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20240538

Central Research Question

This article asks whether the large post-pandemic increase in work from home causally explains the sharp rise in employment among individuals with physical disabilities. The authors focus on whether expanded access to remote work changed labor market opportunities for people who previously faced barriers related to commuting, workplace accessibility, or rigid job design. Rather than documenting a simple correlation, the paper seeks to determine whether the expansion of work from home is a primary driver of the post-COVID increase in disability employment, particularly in full-time positions. The question is framed explicitly as a causal one and is motivated by the historically persistent gap between disability and non-disability employment rates across advanced economies.

Previous Literature

The study builds on several strands of prior research. A large economics literature has documented persistently low employment rates among individuals with disabilities and examined the role of disability insurance, labor market conditions, and policy interventions such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. Much of this work finds limited or even negative employment effects from formal accommodation mandates, often attributing these outcomes to employer avoidance or perceived compliance costs.

A separate literature examines telework and workplace flexibility, including influential work by Dingel and Neiman on the feasibility of working from home and by Bloom and coauthors on productivity, retention, and worker preferences. Related research during the early COVID period documented that jobs classified as teleworkable experienced smaller employment losses. More recent studies showed that disability employment increased more rapidly in teleworkable occupations during the pandemic, but these analyses largely focused on short-run correlations or early recovery periods. This paper contributes by studying the post-pandemic labor market once overall employment had stabilized and by addressing key identification challenges that limited earlier work.

Data

The authors rely primarily on monthly microdata from the U.S. Current Population Survey, which is the main source used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for official disability labor force statistics. The sample includes individuals ages 18–64 and compares two pre-pandemic years (2018–2019) to two post-pandemic years (July 2022–June 2024), excluding the acute COVID disruption period.

Disability status is defined using CPS questions on functional limitations. To address compositional changes after COVID, the analysis focuses on physical disabilities and excludes cognitive disabilities, which increased substantially during the pandemic and could mechanically inflate employment growth. Employment outcomes are measured at the occupation level using two-digit SOC codes.

Work-from-home exposure is measured using multiple sources, including the American Community Survey transportation-to-work question, CPS telework questions, and job postings data. The primary measure is the change in work from home among non-disabled workers within an occupation, which helps avoid reverse causality.

Methods

The empirical strategy exploits variation across occupations in the post-pandemic expansion of work from home. The core specification relates the percent change in disability employment within an occupation to the change in work-from-home rates among non-disabled workers in that occupation. This design assumes that adoption of remote work is driven by demand and supply conditions for the broader workforce, not by the relatively small population of workers with disabilities.

To address confounding from labor market tightness, the authors control flexibly for changes in non-disability employment at the occupation level. They also reweight the data to account for observable compositional shifts in age, gender, race, and education.

For causal identification, the paper uses an instrumental variables approach based on Dingel and Neiman’s pre-pandemic classification of the share of jobs in an occupation that could be done entirely from home. Because this measure is predetermined and based on job task characteristics, it plausibly isolates exogenous variation in post-pandemic remote work adoption. The analysis is conducted at the occupation level and weighted to reflect differences in measurement precision.

Findings/Size Effects

The main findings show a strong and robust causal relationship between work from home and full-time disability employment. Across specifications, a 1 percentage point increase in work-from-home rates leads to approximately a 1.0 percent increase in full-time employment among individuals with physical disabilities. Instrumental variables estimates are slightly larger, around 1.3 percent, suggesting attenuation bias in non-instrumented models.

The results indicate that between 68 and 85 percent of the post-pandemic increase in full-time disability employment can be explained by expanded access to remote work. Importantly, the gains are concentrated entirely in full-time employment, with no statistically meaningful effects on part-time work.

The authors find no comparable employment effects for other demographic groups, including by gender, race, age, or education, underscoring that disability status uniquely interacted with the expansion of work from home. Wage analyses show that in high-WFH occupations, wages for workers with disabilities declined modestly relative to low-WFH occupations, consistent with an outward shift in labor supply rather than a dominant demand-side effect. These patterns strengthen the interpretation that work from home enabled individuals previously outside the labor force to enter full-time employment.

Conclusion

This paper provides credible causal evidence that the post-pandemic expansion of work from home fundamentally altered employment opportunities for individuals with physical disabilities. By combining high-quality CPS data with occupation-level variation and instrumental variables, the authors convincingly isolate the role of remote work from broader labor market trends.

The findings suggest that low disability employment prior to COVID reflected constraints in job design rather than limited work capacity. While the study is U.S.-focused, the mechanisms identified are likely relevant in other advanced economies with similar occupational structures and technological capacity. Although the analysis does not rely on randomized experiments, the causal inference framework is strong and transparent. Overall, the paper represents a significant contribution to both the disability employment and work-from-home literatures by demonstrating that broad changes in workplace organization can produce large, durable labor market effects.