  With the official end of the COVID-19 pandemic, debates about the return to
office have taken center stage among companies and employees. Despite their
ubiquity, the economic implications of return to office policies are not fully
understood. Using 260 million resumes matched to company data, we analyze the
causal effects of such policies on employees' tenure and seniority levels at
three of the largest US tech companies: Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple. Our
estimation procedure is nonparametric and captures the full heterogeneity of
tenure and seniority of employees in a distributional synthetic controls
framework. We estimate a reduction in counterfactual tenure that increases for
employees with longer tenure. Similarly, we document a leftward shift in the
seniority distribution towards positions below the senior level. These shifts
appear to be driven by employees leaving to larger firms that are direct
competitors. Our results suggest that return to office policies can lead to an
outflow of senior employees, posing a potential threat to the productivity,
innovation, and competitiveness of the wider firm.
