We are excited to invite you to attend the upcoming 2026 Remote Work Conference, co-hosted by the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). The conference will take place from noon on October 28 to 1:00 PM on October 30, 2026, and will be streamed live from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During the conference, more than 30 scholars (selected from over 100 submissions) will present their research on topics including the impact of remote work on consumers and cities, organizational structure, mental health, children, and innovation and entrepreneurship. The full conference agenda will be released one week prior to the event and shared with all registered participants.
Jose Maria Barrero is an Associate Professor of Finance (with tenure) at ITAM Business School.
His research spans finance, macroeconomics, and labor economics, using empirical and quantitative methods. He studies how business managers form beliefs about the future and make investment and organizational decisions in uncertain and shifting economic environments. He is especially interested in the broader implications for productivity, labor markets, and the macroeconomy.
He also co-founded the WFH Research project to study the shift to remote work and its implications for businesses, managers, and workers in the United States and around the world.
In addition, he co-organizes the annual ITAM Finance Conference and Remote Work Conference.
Nicholas (Nick) Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research focuses on working from home, management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK Treasury and McKinsey & Company and the IFS. He has a BA from Cambridge, an MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of the Guggenheim and Sloan Fellowships, the Frisch Medal and a National Science Foundation Career Award. He was elected to Bloomberg50 for his advice on working from home.
On the personal side he is English, living with his Scottish wife and American kids on Stanford campus, in a multi-accented English household.
Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury is a Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a globally recognized expert on the Future of Work. Prior to LSE, he was on the faculties at Wharton and Harvard Business School. He studies the changing geography of work. His research focuses on studying management practices to support hybrid work, remote work and work from anywhere (WFA), how companies, communities, and countries are competing for remote workers, and how AI and automation can help both desk workers and deskless workers work from anywhere. In 2023, Forbes included him in ‘The Future of Work 50’ list and in 2024 he was included in the Time-Charter list of thirty thought leaders shaping the future of work. He previously worked at McKinsey & Company and Microsoft and did his Doctorate from Harvard. His research has been cited by the BBC, CNBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Forbes, Fortune, Freakonomics, Al Jazeera, El País, and Times of India, among other outlets. He has delivered keynotes and provided advice to organizations as diverse as Atlassian, Google, ITC, Deel, Young Presidents Organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, the British Parliament and the United Nations, on the Future of Work.
Steven Davis is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Hoover Institution, and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). He was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for more than 35 years, including service as deputy dean of the faculty.
He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, senior adviser to the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, advisor to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, elected fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, IZA Research Fellow, and senior academic fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research. He hosts Economics, Applied – a video podcast series sponsored by the Hoover Institution.
Davis is a co-creator of the Economic Policy Uncertainty Indices, the Survey of Business Uncertainty, the U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, the Global Survey of Working Arrangements, the Work-from-Home Map project, and the Stock Market Jumps project. He cofounded and co-organizes the Asian Monetary Policy Forum, held annually in Singapore.
Natalia Emanuel is a research economist in Microeconomics. Her research focuses on understanding the informal labor market, workplace policies that help firms and workers thrive, and child welfare and criminal justice systems. Emanuel received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 2021 and completed a postdoc at Princeton’s Industrial Relations Section in 2022. Prior to doctoral study, she received a B.A. in economics from Yale University and an M.Sc. in Evidence-Based Social Policy from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar.
A labor economist, Emma Harrington researches remote work and systemic discrimination in the criminal justice system. In her research, she has investigated remote work's consequences on workers' productivity, on-the-job training, and career progression in the context of a Fortune 500 retailer. In addition to remote-work topics, her current projects evaluate the extent to which prosecutors in criminal courts either check or pass through racial biases introduced by police.
Harrington is an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Her research has been funded by the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy and the Bradley Foundation. Her research on prosecutors won the University of Chicago’s Donald M. Ephraim Prize in Law & Economics. Her research on remote work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, National Public Radio, Bloomberg, Vox, and other media outlets. She has co-organized the Remote Work Conference at Stanford University and a session at the American Economic Association meetings.
She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2021 and did a postdoctoral fellowship in Princeton University’s Industrial Relations Section for the 2021-2022 academic year. Before arriving at UVA, Harrington was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Iowa.
