This study examines the productivity of working from home (WFH) practices during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The results reveal that the mean WFH productivity relative to working at the usual workplace was about 60%–70%, and it was lower for employees and firms that started WFH practice only after the spread of the COVID‐19 pandemic. However, there was a large dispersion of WFH productivity, both by individual and firm characteristics. Highly educated and high‐wage employees tended to exhibit a small reduction in WFH productivity. The results obtained from the employee and employer surveys were generally consistent with each other.

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The achievement of both sustainable economic growth and reductions in CO 2 emissions has been an important policy agenda in recent years. This study, using novel establishment-level microdata from the Energy Consumption Statistics, empirically analyzes the effect of urban density on energy intensity in the service sector. According to the analysis, the efficiency of energy consumption in service establishments is higher for densely populated cities. Quantitatively, after controlling for differences among industries, energy efficiency increases by approximately 12% when the density in a municipality population doubles. This result suggests that, given a structural transformation toward the service economy, deregulation of excessive restrictions hindering urban agglomeration, and investment in infrastructure in city centers would contribute to environmentally friendly economic growth.

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