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α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
High-income business service workers dominate the economies of major US cities, and their spending supports many local consumer service jobs. As a result, business services' high remote work potential poses a risk to consumer service workers who could lose an essential source of revenue if business service workers left big cities to work from elsewhere. We use the COVID-19-induced increase in remote work to provide empirical evidence for this mechanism and its role in shaping the pandemic's economic impact. Our findings have broader implications for the distributional consequences of the transition to more remote work.