Nick Bloom

In our data, we see that there are household budgeting stresses happening across the spectrum of incomes.

And about a year ago at this time, we saw about 19 percent of households that were actively switching from premium brands down to store brands.

That number's jumped up to almost 22 percent.

Firms founded since 2015 had employees working from home nearly twice as often as firms founded before 1990.

Nick Bloom of Stanford University co-authored the study.

Many of them switched to work from home at the height of the pandemic, but then called employees back into the office once they could.

And workers didn't love that, says Pablo Zarate of Princeton, another co-author.

And that could give newer firms a hiring advantage over their older, set-in-their-office-ways counterparts, says Claudia Macaluso, an economist with the Richmond Federal Reserve.

Still, Macaluso says it's important to not over-interpret the results of the study.

Even the youngest firms had employees working from home just about one and a half days a week on average.

Which is one reason Stanford's Nick Bloom says the trend probably doesn't herald the end of corporate office space.

But he says it could impact another piece of the real estate market.

And perhaps a home office.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

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