economist nick bloom: >> maybe a year wh two from now firms relax and say, look, you can come back into the office if you like, you can come back in two or three days a week and spend e other couple of days at home. that's, you know, the omised land, but that's definitely not where we are now. >> reporter: now work from home has ng had a surprisingly ba rap, bloom illustrated in a 2017 ted talk. >> if you go to google or to bi and you punch in "working from home" into image search, what do you get? a lot of pictures of basically naked people, cartoons, people juggling way too many babies to actually be doing anything constructive. >> reporter: but bloom, wanting to actually study the economic effects, found a willing partner: c-trip, china's largest >> here's a picturheir headquarters in shanghai. they're interested in working from home because shanghai is a phenomenally expensive place to run a business; very dilbertesque, lots of desks and people working, taking calls. >> reporter: two random groups of 500 workers each were studied. the results? >> we found amazingly that the working