The Global Market for Remote White-Collar Jobs

Abstract

The rise of remote work connects workers and firms across countries. We study the location preferences, wage patterns, and surplus created by cross-country remote hiring using a novel data set of over 200,000 international, remote, and predominantly white-collar workers from 195 countries working for more than 20,000 firms. We document that richer countries hire and supply more remote workers compared to poorer countries. Moreover, sharing a common language is associated with greater cross-country work contracts. We observe a narrower cross-country wage gap in international remote hiring compared to traditional domestic hiring and attribute around one third of the remaining wage gap between workers from high-income and non-high-income countries to differential sorting into firms. Finally, we quantify the surplus gained from cross-country remote hiring, showing that both the firms and workers involved benefit substantially.