Nicholas Bloom

Nicholas Bloom is the economist whose experiments are the evidence everyone else in the remote work debate is quoting, usually without knowing it.

He has studied working from home for more than two decades, long before it was a question most companies had to answer. His 2015 study of a Chinese travel company randomized call center staff between home and office and found that the people at home were substantially more productive, which was the first rigorous result on the subject and is still the most cited. His 2024 study, published in Nature, randomized hybrid work at scale and found it did not damage performance but did cut turnover, which is the finding a chief executive arguing about return-to-office mandates most needs to have heard.

He is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford, where he has taught since 2005, and cofounder of WFH Research, which tracks how much work is actually done from home and where. Before Stanford he worked at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and HM Treasury in London, at McKinsey, and at the London School of Economics. He holds a doctorate from University College London, a master's from Oxford and a bachelor's from Cambridge, and his other work is on uncertainty, management practices and productivity.

The awards are the academic kind that indicate the work holds up: the Frisch Medal in 2010, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020, and a place on the Bloomberg 50 in 2022 for his influence on how companies thought about working from home. He met President Obama on the subject and spoke at the 2014 Working Families Summit.

He is booked by leadership teams that want to settle a return-to-office argument with evidence rather than with whoever is most senior, and by HR and workplace conferences. The sessions are built around data and are direct about what it does and does not show, which is why they land with executives who are tired of opinion. A keynote is often paired with a closed session for the leadership team making the decision.