Can Remote Workers Reverse Brain Drain?

Researchers found that when remote workers were paid to move to Tulsa, Okla., everyone came out ahead.

Business leaders and local officials in Tulsa, Okla., puzzled for years over how to fill the hole created when young people left for big coastal cities. What, they wondered, could keep professionals rooted in the heartland?

They ended up turning that premise on its head: Rather than fighting to hold on to native Tulsans, they decided to recruit outsiders. In recent years, the rise of virtual work opened up a new way of responding to the city’s brain drain.

Five years after the George Kaiser Family Foundation began offering $10,000 to remote workers willing to move to Tulsa for at least a year, some 3,300 people have taken up the offer.

Steven Briggs, 55, was working remotely as a data scientist in Dallas when he applied for the program, Tulsa Remote. He and his wife moved to Tulsa in 2021, and he jokes that his new hometown embodies the flip side of the famous line about New York City: “What you can say about Tulsa is ‘If you can’t make it anywhere, you can make it here.’”

The sudden onset of remote work during the pandemic prompted plenty of cities and states — Topeka, Kan., and Savannah, Ga.; West Virginia and northwest Arkansas — to vie for new residents with programs offering cash incentives. Tulsa’s program is one of the largest. Researchers at Harvard and other universities examined the effects of Tulsa Remote, wondering whether it was proving a good deal for the remote workers and the city itself.

Their research, released this month, surveyed 1,248 people — including 411 who had participated in Tulsa Remote and others who were accepted but didn’t move or weren’t accepted but had applied to the program — and found that remote workers who moved to Tulsa saved an average of $25,000 more on annual housing costs than the group that was chosen but didn’t move. The relocations were also a boon for the State of Oklahoma and the City of Tulsa, bringing in some $14.9 million in annual income tax revenue and $5.8 million in sales taxes from the remote workers, the researchers estimated.