S8 Ep37: The effect of working from home on house prices
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.
Now that many of us work part or all our week at home, does that mean we want to move to a different area, or a larger house? And what is the effect on housing for those who cannot work from home? Morgane Richard of Stanford has researched how Londoners sought out new homes post-Covid to match their flexible work arrangements. She tells Tim Phillips what her models tell us about the long-run impact of their new working lives on house prices and rents for everyone living in, and on the edge of, the city.
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S8 Ep36: Davis: Will working from home stick?
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.
Go back six or seven years and working from home was an exception. Bosses discouraged it, contracts didn’t mention it, and we didn’t have the technology to do it.
Covid changed all that. But since then, how have work patterns changed? Should we believe the press reports that we’re all being summoned back to the office, or is remote work now part of our lives – and what does that mean for employers and employees?
Steve Davis of the Hoover Institution and SIEPR has been measuring the evolution of flexible working since the pandemic. He spoke to Tim Phillips about the far-off times when little work was done at home, who is taking advantage of the change in the way we work, and who benefited most from the Great Resignation and the changes in hiring and outsourcing that followed it.
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S8 Ep35: The global impact of AI
If we focus on the cutting edge of AI implementation, we’re also focusing on a small set of technologically advanced countries. How will AI affect work in the rest of the world, what should those countries do to prepare, and how can they make best use of the technology? Giovanni Melina of the IMF is one of the authors of two papers that calculates both the exposure of jobs to AI around the world, and the readiness of those countries to meet the challenge of using AI effectively at work.
He talks to Tim Phillips about the extent of the exposure to AI in emerging markets and developing countries, whether those countries have the infrastructure to implement applications of the technology, and the policies that would be most effective to increase their preparedness.
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S8 Ep34: How good are LLMs at doing our jobs?
In the second of special series recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025, we are asking, how good is AI at doing real-world job task? And how can we measure their capability without resorting to technical benchmarks that may not mean much in the workplace?
Since we all became aware of large language models, LLMs scientists have been attempting to evaluate how good they are at performing expert tasks. The results of those tests can show us whether LLMs can be useful complements to our work, or even replacements for us, as many fear. But setting or grading a test to decide whether an LLM can do a problem-solving job task, rather than solve an abstract problem, isn't easy to do. Maria del Rio-Chanona, a computer scientist at UCL, tells Tim Phillips about her innovative work-in-progress, in which she asks an LLM to set a tricky workplace exam, then tells another LLM to take the test – which a third LLM evaluates.
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S8 Ep33: Autor: Automation and the value of expertise
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.
This year the annual Paris School of Economics-PSE Policy Forum is organized around three themes: artificial intelligence and labour reallocation, working conditions and remote work, and inequality in the workplace. In short, what's work going to look like in the future?
Our series of podcasts, recorded live at the event, starts with David Autor’s work on the impact of AI on jobs. Rather than speculate about how soon AI will destroy work, David’s research focuses on which tasks AI will automate, and what that means in terms of the expertise needed to do these jobs in the future. He tells Tim Phillips that some jobs will become more expert and some less – but the employment effects of AI may be the opposite of what many people expect.
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