​​Working from home has become a perk like free lunch, and it could be replacing higher salaries

Remote work has an innate “amenity value,” comparable to company-provided lunch or discounted gym membership, explain the researchers. The value of remote work is taking the time that workers once spent commuting to an office and giving it back to spend with themselves and their family. There’s a price for that, the paper argues, and it could explain this year’s 3% decline in hourly earnings, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in May.