Mitchell Valdes-Bobes
PhD Candidate
Welcome to my academic website! I’m Mitchell Valdes-Bobes, a sixth-year PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. My work sits at the intersection of macroeconomics and labor economics, where I use structural search models to study how policy and firm organization shape labor-market outcomes.
Research Interests:
- Labor market dynamics
- Search and matching theory
- Policy impacts on employment
Current Focus:
- Analyzing the effects of remote work on labor market outcomes.
- Exploring the implications of generative AI on labor markets.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about my work or are interested in potential collaborations.
Job Market Paper
- Why Remote Work Stuck: A Structural Decomposition of the Post-Pandemic Equilibrium2025Abstract: The post-pandemic labor market featured a persistent increase in remote work arrangements. We ask whether this re-valuation of work is mostly due to a shift in worker preferences for flexibility or advances in technology that make remote work more feasible. We develop and estimate a general equilibrium search model featuring heterogeneity in worker skill and idiosyncratic worker tastes. A key innovation is our novel, continuous measure of occupational teleworkability, which allows the model to capture rich heterogeneity in remote-work potential across firms and occupations. We estimate the model’s deep parameters via the Simulated Method of Moments (SMM), disciplined by rich microdata from two distinct periods: 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2024 (post-pandemic). Our analysis reveals that the shift is overwhelmingly driven by a profound revaluation of in-office time by workers. A structural decomposition shows that this preference shock accounts for 56.8% of the total increase in the average share of remote work, while concurrent shocks to remote work technology account for 33.0% of the shift.