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Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment
Abstract
A rising share of employees now regularly engage in working from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking
from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call
center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned either to work from home or in the office for nine months.
Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick
days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment). Home workers also
reported improved work satisfaction, and their attrition rate halved, but their promotion rate conditional on performance
fell. Due to the success of the experiment, Ctrip rolled out the option to WFH to the whole firm and allowed the experimental
employees to reselect between the home and office. Interestingly, over half of them switched, which led to the gains from
WFH almost doubling to 22%. This highlights the benefits of learning and selection effects when adopting modern management
practices like WFH. JEL Codes: D24, L23, L84, M11, M54, O31.
... In contrast, increased work authority may induce intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000;Blau, 2017;Delfgaauw & Dur, 2008), a pertinent determinant of employees' productivity (Becchetti et al., 2013). The empirical research on the topic finds that increasing workers' authority enhances their performance (Eaton, 2003;Lyness et al., 2012;Kelliher & Anderson, 2010;Beckmann et al., 2017;Bloom et al., 2015;Rupietta & Beckmann, 2018). However, research also suggests that the effect is not uniform and may depend on job characteristics. ...
... Separate from earlier research investigating how voluntarily taken WFH affects employees' performance (Bloom et al., 2015;Rupietta & Beckmann, 2018), we establish the existence of a modest positive effect of WFH on employee performance even when WFH is 'forced' by the government, a scenario where positive reciprocity does not play a role. Second, our use of a dedicated and large control group of employees for the empirical analysis -those who observe no change in their WFH behavior because of the pandemic, including employees who never took WFH before and during the pandemic -captures general effects of the pandemic on labor market outcomes that are unrelated to WFH's impact and sets the paper apart from emerging literature on the topic (Etheridge et al., 2020;Lee & Tipoe, 2020;Feng & Savani, 2020;Kunze et al., 2020). ...
... Given the increased prevalence of WFH in recent years, emerging economics literature investigates whether switching to WFH affects employees' performance. For instance, using a randomized controlled trial with call center workers in China, Bloom et al. (2015) show that employees switching to WFH observe an increase in their performance by 13%, of which 9% was due to productivity change per shift, such as quieter and more convenient working environment, and 4% was due to longer minutes per day, such as fewer breaks and sick days. The literature investigating the employees' performance during the COVID-19 pandemic reports supporting evidence. ...
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced governments in many countries to ask employees to work from home (WFH) where possible. Using representative data from the UK, we show that increases in WFH frequency are associated with a higher self-perceived productivity per hour and an increase in weekly working hours among the employed. The WFH-productivity relationship is stronger for employees residing in regions worse affected by the pandemic and those who previously commuted longer distances, while it is weaker for mothers with childcare responsibilities. Also, we find that employees with higher autonomy over job tasks and work hours and those with childcare responsibilities worked longer hours when working from home. With prospects that WFH possibility may remain permanently open for some employees, we discuss our results' labor market policy implications.
... In contrast, increased work authority may induce intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000;Blau, 2017;Delfgaauw & Dur, 2008), a pertinent determinant of employees' productivity (Becchetti et al., 2013). The empirical research on the topic finds that increasing workers' authority enhances their performance (Eaton, 2003;Lyness et al., 2012;Kelliher & Anderson, 2010;Beckmann et al., 2017;Bloom et al., 2015;Rupietta & Beckmann, 2018). However, research also suggests that the effect is not uniform and may depend on job characteristics. ...
... Separate from earlier research investigating how voluntarily taken WFH affects employees' performance (Bloom et al., 2015;Rupietta & Beckmann, 2018), we establish the existence of a modest positive effect of WFH on employee performance even when WFH is 'forced' by the government, a scenario where positive reciprocity does not play a role. Second, our use of a dedicated and large control group of employees for the empirical analysis -those who observe no change in their WFH behavior because of the pandemic, including employees who never took WFH before and during the pandemic -captures general effects of the pandemic on labor market outcomes that are unrelated to WFH's impact and sets the paper apart from emerging literature on the topic (Etheridge et al., 2020;Lee & Tipoe, 2020;Feng & Savani, 2020;Kunze et al., 2020). ...
... Given the increased prevalence of WFH in recent years, emerging economics literature investigates whether switching to WFH affects employees' performance. For instance, using a randomized controlled trial with call center workers in China, Bloom et al. (2015) show that employees switching to WFH observe an increase in their performance by 13%, of which 9% was due to productivity change per shift, such as quieter and more convenient working environment, and 4% was due to longer minutes per day, such as fewer breaks and sick days. The literature investigating the employees' performance during the COVID-19 pandemic reports supporting evidence. ...
... Dennoch gibt die Zusammenschau der Studien Hinweise, dass die Pandemie für einige Menschen auch mittel-bzw. langfristig mit positiven Nebenwirkungen einhergehen kann, die sich insbesondere durch das Arbeiten im Home-Office zu ergeben scheinen (Bloom et al., 2015;Reuschke, 2019). ...
... Auch hier sei ergänzend auf positive Nebenwirkungen hingewiesen: Beispielsweise beabsichtigen laut einer Umfrage 13 73 % der Unternehmen, die während der Pandemie verstärkt Homeoffice genutzt haben, dies auch in Zukunft zu tun. Dies kann sichbedingt durch positive Konsequenzen für die Organisation von Familie und Beruf, die Work-Life-Balance und flexible Lebensmodelleauch positiv auf die psychische Gesundheit auswirken (Bloom et al., 2015;Reuschke, 2019). ...
Zusammenfassung. Die COVID-19-Pandemie als multidimensionaler und potenziell toxischer Stressfaktor führt auch in Deutschland zu psychischen Problemen in der Allgemeinbevölkerung und wird voraussichtlich einen Anstieg der Inzidenz- und Prävalenzraten psychischer Störungen bedingen. In diesem Positionspapier erfolgt daher eine wissenschaftlich differenzierte Betrachtung der psychologischen Auswirkungen der COVID-19-Pandemie auf verschiedene Altersstufen sowie psychische Vulnerabilitäten und Störungsbilder, wobei auch Chancen für die psychische Gesundheit und psychotherapeutische Versorgung diskutiert werden. Basierend auf den Befunden werden abschließend u. a. folgende gesundheitspolitische Ziele und Maßnahmen abgeleitet: Implementierung von universellen und indizierten modularen Präventionsangeboten sowie Anpassung der evidenzbasierten Richtlinienpsychotherapien hinsichtlich Bedarf, Inhalt und Modalität. Die Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie stellt aufgrund ihrer ausgewiesenen Expertise im Bereich der psychischen Gesundheit zentrales Wissen für die erfolgreiche Bewältigung der COVID-19-Pandemie zur Verfügung und kann in interdisziplinären und interprofessionellen Kooperationen dazu beitragen, die Herausforderungen für die psychische Gesundheit anzugehen.
... A few randomized-controlled trials provide evidence that WFH can be more productive than working in the office, at least for some workers. For example, Bloom, Liang, Roberts and Ying (2015) randomly assigned employees at a large Chinese travel company to work from home. They find that the home-based teleworkers are more productive, have fewer unscheduled absences and lower quit rates than their office counterparts. ...
... In areas where office space is more expensive, employers have an additional incentive to encourage work from home with monetary incentives. On the other hand, employers who place a higher value on teamwork may encourage on-site presence with higher wages or promotions, leading to lower wage trajectories for teleworkers even with no difference in productivity (Rhee 2008;Bloom, Liang, Roberts and Ying 2015;Glass and Noonan 2016). ...
Remote work is rapidly increasing in the US. Using data on full-time wage and salary workers from the American Time Use Survey Leave and Job Flexibilities Module, we estimate hourly wage differentials between teleworkers and office workers and compare how teleworkers and office workers allocate their time on office days and work-at-home days. Using an econometric method that relates selection on observables with selection on unobservables, we find that some teleworkers earn a wage premium, but it varies by occupation, gender, parental status, and teleworking intensity. In all subsamples, male, but not female, home-based teleworkers earn a wage premium. Among occasional teleworkers, we find a wage premium for all subsamples with the exception of mothers and men without children. Using time diaries, we find that teleworkers spend less time on commuting and grooming activities but more time on leisure and household production activities and more time with family on work-at-home days than office days. We do not find differences in workers' hours on average by telework status, but male teleworkers regardless of their work location on their diary day work slightly fewer minutes on weekday workdays than office workers.
... Remote work is an essential mode of work across industries [7]. Before COVID-19, many companies had already experimented with or implemented various forms of remote work [9], e.g., recruiting remote employees or allowing employees to work from home part-time. ...
... Remote work has long been an important topic of research across scientific fields. Through a Working-From-Home (WFH) experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee Chinese travel agency, Bloom et al. [7] studied the costs and benefits of remote work, where they showed that WFH led to improved performance but reduced promotion rate. Prior work also investigated other aspects of remote work, such as management of workers [23], organizational design [53,63], communication challenges [29], team performance [37], wellbeing [12,64], and emerging roles [14] and experience [10,11]. ...
Virtual meetings are critical for remote work because of the need for synchronous collaboration in the absence of in-person interactions. In-meeting multitasking is closely linked to people's productivity and wellbeing. However, we currently have limited understanding of multitasking in remote meetings and its potential impact. In this paper, we present what we believe is the most comprehensive study of remote meeting multitasking behavior through an analysis of a large-scale telemetry dataset collected from February to May 2020 of U.S. Microsoft employees and a 715-person diary study. Our results demonstrate that intrinsic meeting characteristics such as size, length, time, and type, significantly correlate with the extent to which people multitask, and multitasking can lead to both positive and negative outcomes. Our findings suggest important best-practice guidelines for remote meetings (e.g., avoid important meetings in the morning) and design implications for productivity tools (e.g., support positive remote multitasking).
... On the other side, during the pandemic remote working has become the norm for many professions globally. The positive results observed by Bloom et al. (2015) with respect to increased performance and job satisfaction with remote working are an additional reason to investigate the willingness of individuals to accept this kind of jobs. ...
... where i represents the number of regression equations in the model, equal to 4; p represents the time period (from 1 to P , with P tending to ∞); and ip indicates that errors are correlated across equations for a single individual but uncorrelated across individuals. 6 Each equation has its dependent variable y ip and a vector X i of regressors. Thus, Eq. (1) can be written in vector form as follows: ...
The recent SARS-Cov-2 pandemic has contributed to several corporate crises. As a result, many Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Italy have filed for bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2020. In addition to a gigantic macroeconomic effect, the lockdown has impacted individuals to a large ex- tent. In this article, we investigate the behavioural response of employees who are under a dual condition of stress; namely, the pandemic and the risk of job loss. The hypothesis of employment hysteresis is challenged by looking at the tendency of individuals who are employed in firms facing a crisis, or in diffi- culty, to participate in training measures for: a similar job, remote working, and self-employment. Findings from a seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) model show a significant increase in the likelihood to participate in standard or high-commitment training measures for similar jobs and remote working for employees who: i) positively value their professional social capital, i.e. their membership in a trade union (+24.4 and +25.2 percentage points, respectively); ii) have some displaced colleagues (+29.6 and +40.7 percentage points, respec- tively). Finally, we find that employees with a lower educational background are less likely to consider the possibility of switching between occupations.
... To support innovation, firms should create workplace environments that are perceived by employees to be pleasant, low-stress, supportive of continuous learning, and encouraging of active sharing of new knowledge and creative ideas [9,10]. Responsible care for employees can increase job satisfaction and help firms to attract and retain talented people who will be the critical factor in corporate innovation process [11][12][13]. In recent years, being socially responsible for employees, and more broadly, the corporate social responsibility (CSR), of which labor care is seen as a key ingredient, have been increasingly emphasized by modern enterprises [14,15]. ...
... By providing training and learning opportunities, employees will be more experienced, skilled, and technically qualified, thus leading to better knowledge transfer across different segments within the firm [55,68]. A pleasant working environment also helps companies to attract and retain talented people whose participation and team-working are closely associated with the successful innovation [12]. Novel knowledge can be triggered when employees have greater perceived efficacy and working enthusiasm [69]. ...
Sustainability of the workforce becomes a crucial issue, of which responsible care for employees can increase job satisfaction and human capital that impact corporate ability to absorb and generate new knowledge. Firms are obligated to provide a healthy and safe working environment for their employees, but it may in turn hinder innovation due to rigid and structured institutional regulations. Drawing on data of 308 China’s pharmaceutical firms from 2010 to 2017, we investigated whether employee care can trigger innovation under corporate adoption of the occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS). Our results suggest that both employee care and OHSMS adoption have a positive impact on innovation. Moreover, the positive relationship between employee care and innovation was more pronounced in firms that had adopted the OHSMS certification. These findings are valuable to policymakers and corporate managers in emerging economies through corroborating the important role of workforce sustainability in facilitating firm innovation.
... Additionally, as the number of dual-income families increased in the 1970s and 1980s, telecommuting became an option for workers to manage work and family responsibilities. By 1997, 10,000 federal government employees were working from home or from other remote locations 1 . Based on the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) annual survey of randomly selected professionals in 2014, 59% of US employers allowed form of telecommuting. ...
... The change in our model of healthcare delivery to a work-from-home telehealth model positively-affected call-off rates. Our review of the literature reveals a study of Chinese call-center employees which found that those randomly assigned to telecommute were more productive, more satis ed, and less likely to leave the organization than those working under standard arrangements 10 . Another study examining telecommuting work arrangements for medical coders 11 , found those who were able to work in the home or satellite o ce or those who were able to work from any location (home, satellite o ce, or main o ce) were signi cantly more productive (based on quantity and quality of coding over a 6-month period of time) than those who worked only in the main o ce and those able to work from home or in the main o ce. ...
Provider burnout is a challenge faced by most large healthcare systems. Like many hospital systems, our system has struggled with burnout and turnover in our primary care clinician workforce. In March 2020 due to COVID, our large safety-net system had to rapidly transform from primarily in-person care to primarily telehealth visits. We sought to understand how this change in our model of healthcare delivery to enable telecommuting would affect absenteeism among primary care clinicians. We transitioned all 192 primary care nurse practitioners and physicians in the fields of Internal medicine, Family medicine, Medicine-Pediatrics, and Geriatrics across our health system to predominately a remote telehealth schedule. During March-May 2019, the percentage of telehealth visits was less than 1%. The shift to telehealth Mid-March 2020, shows an increase in telehealth by 35.9%. Telehealth visit volumes shifted to 87.4% for the month of April 2020 while leveling to 58.4% in May 2020 as patients needed services that required in person visits. Our analysis shows that the average decrease in call off rate from March- May 2019 compared to 2020 was 40.8%. Telehealth includes telecommunication through a variety of platforms. For primary care clinicians, telehealth provides an additional tool to manage panels of patients with potentially greater ease and efficiency. We know that clinicians want to provide high quality care for their patients, and they want some flexibility and autonomy to do so. Telecommuting may offer those benefits to providers.
... Kajian mendapati orang ramai yang bekerja dari rumah akan menjadi lebih produktif kerana mereka tidak lagi terdedah kepada pelbagai gangguan yang mengalihkan perhatian. Menurut kajian oleh Bloom et. al (2015) produktiviti telah meningkat di antara 20% hingga 30%. Keadaan sekeliling yang bising akan menambah kesukaran untuk fokus dalam menyelesaikan tugas di pejabat. ...
... Staf tidak lagi terikat pada jadual yang ditetapkan oleh orang lain dan bebas memilih untuk lakukan apa sahaja, pada waktu yang dimahukan dan dimana saja. Kajian oleh Bloom et al. (2015) menunjukan masa yang fleksibel dalam perlaksanaan BdR dapat meningkatkan presteasi pekerja sebanyak 13%. Pendekatan ini juga dapat menarik dan mengekalkan pekerja, mewujudkan kepelbagaian kerja serta meningkatkan penglibatan kerja (Beaurgard & Basile, 2013). ...
The year 2020 has witnessed the world being swept by the Covid-19 pandemic that has greatly changed the social and economic landscapes of many countries globally. Among the changes brought upon by this pandemic involves the way one works. With the spread of this pandemic, residents in many areas have begun to benefit from the use of various technologies in many activities, including sales and purchase, and performing work in order to minimise from being exposed to activities outside the house. This research was performed with the aim to look at the potential of implementing a work from home programme among the academic staff in a public university in Malaysia. A questionnaire was distributed to observe the feedback regarding the implementation of this programme, and it was revealed that almost all academic staff believed that this programme can be established for academic staff and they stated their readiness to be involved and support the implementation of such a programme.
... However, contrary to the expectation of a progressive disappearance of offices and the spreading of nomad workers operating from their "electronic cottages" (Toffler and Alvin, 1980;Makimoto and Manners, 1997), telework has been only slowly diffusing, with the highest rates recorded in the Northern European countries, Japan and the US (Messenger, 2017). Indeed, since 1980 the proportion of employees who primarily work from home has more than tripled and the range of 'teleworkable activities' has also increased including a wide spectrum of service jobs, ranging from sales assistants and realtors to managers and software engineers (Bloom et al., 2015). ...
... 3 Teleworking is supposed to reduce spared time (log-in), eventual unproductive working phases (breaks) and sick leaves. This seems to be confirmed by Bloom et al. (2015) which find that being assigned to telework raises individual productivity. Dutcher (2012), via a quasi-experimental setting, shows that working from home can have positive implications on productivity in the case of creative tasks, while a negative relationship is detected in the case of repetitive and low-skilled tasks. ...
Why are there so many non-teleworkable occupations? Is teleworking only a matter of ICT usage or does it also reflect the division of labour and the underlying hierarchical layers inside organiza-tions? What does it happen to those workers not able to telework in terms of socioeconomic risks, and how does the gender dimension interact with risk stratification? Hereby, we intend to shed light on these questions using a detailed integrated dataset at individual and occupational level (Indagine Campionaria delle Professioni, Indagine delle Forze di Lavoro and Inail archive) which provides information on different nature of risks (income, employment and safety). Our results entail that, first, class attributes strongly influence the chance of working from home, second, those individuals who are not able to perform their work remotely are more exposed to transition to unemployment, to earn low wages, and to safety and health risks, third, being woman and employed with a temporary contract significantly amplify risk stratification. JEL classification: J2, D2, D63, I14, C38.
... These preferences might evolve depending on their experience during the lockdown. Bloom et al. (2015) study the effects of an experiment that randomly allocated call centre employees to the home or the offi ce. At the end of the experiment, employees were given the choice over where to work, and those who were more productive at home switched to WFH. ...
... new results for Germany). In addition, experiments at the fi rm level show that WFH may increase worker productivity (Bloom et al., 2015;Angelici and Profeta, 2020). In fact, the need to organise remote work on a grand scale during the coronavirus pandemic is likely to establish new and highly productive forms of remote work that may even substitute for certain on-site activities or business meetings. ...
As the COVID-19 pandemic causes a record number of people to work from home, this disruptive event will likely have a long-lasting impact on work arrangements. Given existing research on the effects of working from home on hours worked and wages, an increased availability of working from home may provide a chance for women to catch up with their male counterparts. Yet, the need to simultaneously care for children during the COVID-19 lockdown may also revive traditional gender roles, potentially counteracting such gains. We discuss the likely effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender gaps in the labour market and at home in light of recent empirical findings and novel statistics on the heterogeneous structure of work arrangements among couples. We construct a novel teleworkability index that differentiates between fully teleworkable, partly teleworkable and on-site jobs and find that in about a third of households the COVID-19 shock is likely to induce shifts in the intra-household allocation of tasks from mothers to fathers.
... The ASHE contains a random 1% sample of all employees in England, Wales, and Scot-2 A substantial recent literature has studied the efficiency of working from home. Bloom et al. (2015) provide evidence from a within-firm RCT that homeworking increases the productivity of call-centre workers by up to 22%. Mas and Pallais (2017) find that the average call-centre worker is willing to pay 8% to work from home. ...
The Covid-19 health crisis has led to a substantial increase in work done from home, which shifts economic activity across geographic space. We refer to this shift as a Zoomshock. The Zoomshock has implications for locally consumed services; the clientèle of restaurants, coffee bars, pubs, hair stylists, health clubs located near workplaces now demand those services near where they live. In this paper we measure the Zoomshock at a granular level for UK neighbourhoods. We establish three important empirical facts. First, the Zoomshock is large; many workers can work-from-home and live in a different neighbourhood than they work. Second, the Zoomshock is very heterogenous; economic activity is decreasing in productive city centres and increasing residential suburbs. Third, the Zoomshock moves workers away from neighbourhoods with a large supply of locally consumed services to neighbourhoods where the supply of these services is relatively scarce. We discuss the implications for aggregate employment and local economic recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paper now available in Covid Economics, Issue 64, pp. 1-41.
... Our previous conceptual model focusing on the workplace setting is centered on the conditions of work, driven by organizational policies, programs and practices within the context of enterprise as well as worker characteristics (Fig. 1) (Sorensen et al., 2016). Physical, organizational, and psychosocial conditions at work contribute directly to worker safety, health, and wellbeing , and influence enterprise outcomes such as turnover, absence, productivity, and healthcare costs (Goh et al., 2016;Bloom et al., 2015;Williams et al., 2018a). The model also illustrates causal pathways through which workplace policies, programs, and practices may influence worker and enterprise outcomes, highlighting the importance of organizational interventions that improve working conditions. ...
Work plays a central role in health. A conceptual model can help frame research priorities and questions to explore determinants of workers’ safety, health, and wellbeing. A previous conceptual model focused on the workplace setting to emphasize the role of conditions of work in shaping workers’ safety, health and wellbeing. These conditions of work include physical, organizational, and psychosocial factors. This manuscript presents and discusses an updated and expanded conceptual model, placing the workplace and the conditions of work within the broader context of socio-political-economic environments and consequent trends in employment and labor force patterns. Social, political and economic trends, such as growing reliance on technology, climate change, and globalization, have significant implications for workers’ day-to-day experiences. These structural forces in turn shape employment and labor patterns, with implications for the availability and quality of jobs; the nature of relationships between employers and workers; and the benefits and protections available to workers. Understanding these patterns will be critical for anticipating the consequences of future changes in the conditions of work, and ultimately help inform decision-making around policies and practices intended to protect and promote worker safety, health, and wellbeing. This model provides a structure for anticipating research needs in response to the changing nature of work, including the formation of research priorities, the need for expanded research methods and measures, and attention to diverse populations of enterprises and workers. This approach anticipates changes in the way work is structured, managed, and experienced by workers and can effectively inform policies and practices needed to protect and promote worker safety, health and wellbeing.
... Telework is often associated with the perceived increase of productivity and job satisfaction, although mostly self-reported by home workers, but also a great managerial issue and a loss of control as reported by the managers [2]. Managers repeatedly raise the question whether "working-fromhome" would not lead to "shirking from home" [5]. The typical "Theory X style managers" [6] with a low perception of selfefficacy, i.e. who do not rely on their employees' ability to handle remote infrastructure, solve situations independently, manage time properly or working without supervision have an especially skeptical attitude towards telework [7]. ...
The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused a major disruption worldwide. The interruptions to production, transportation and mobility have clearly had a significant impact on the well-functioning of the global supply and demand chain. But what happened to the companies developing digital services, such as software? Were they interrupted as much or at all? And how has the enforced Working-From-Home (WFH) mode impacted their ability to continue to deliver software. We hear that some managers are concerned that their engineers are not working effectively from home, or even lack the motivation to work in general, that teams lose touch and that managers do not notice when things go wrong. At the same time, some companies, like Twitter and Facebook, announce their permanent remote-work policies. In this article, we share our findings from monitoring the situation in an international software company with engineers located in Sweden, USA and the UK, by analyzing archives of commit data, calendar invites and Slack communication, as well as the internal reports of WFH experiences and 18 interviews. We find that company engineers continue committing code and carry out their daily duties without major disruptions, while their routines have gradually adjusted to the new norm with new emerging practices and various changes to the old ones.
... Importantly, telecommuting may have opposing effects on these dimensions of performance underlying innovation. On the one hand, telecommuting could improve general productivity through increased time availability and improved work efficiency per unit of time ( Bloom et al., 2015;. Although prior studies focus on relatively less-skilled employees than inventors (e.g., call center employees), telecommuting could plausibly have a positive effect on the general productivity of inventors. ...
We estimate the causal effect of workplace–home commuting distance on inventor productivity. We construct a novel panel of U.S. inventors with precisely measured workplace–home distances and inventor-level productivity. Our identification strategy exploits firm relocations as exogenous variations in the commuting distance of the firm’s inventors. We find a significant negative effect from commuting distance on inventor productivity: every 10 km increase in distance is associated with a 5% decrease in patent counts per inventor–firm pair per year and an even greater 7% decrease in patent quality. The highest-performing inventors suffer the greatest from increased commuting distance. We discuss the implications of our findings in the light of recent trends around telecommuting and remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
... In particular, a number of studies demonstrate evidence of increased levels of job satisfaction and increased productivity of company employees when using flexible, including remote forms of employment (e.g. Bloom et al., 2015;Voronina, 2016). Remote work is very in demand, it is becoming a trend in the labour market, this is due to a number of its advantages: to independently distribute their working time; combine https: //doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2020.12.03.6 Corresponding Author: Anastasiya Pesha Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference eISSN: 61 several works at the same time; work from another region (country); combination of work with studies, child care (this is especially important for young families with children); saving time and transportation costs. ...
... We note that as we move forward with our analysis, we will probably need to look more closely at the range of shocks in the various categories, particularly as information comes to light on differentiation across developed, developing and least developed countries. 4 Although the economics literature has reported productivity increases as a result of working from home, this literature finds that the beneficial effects of working from home are only satisfied under certain conditions such as the attitude towards working from home (Bloom et al., 2015;Neufeld & Fang, 2005) and the degree of social interaction. Dutcher (2012) finds that workers performing creative tasks are likely to benefit from increases in productivity when working remotely, in contrast to workers performing repetitive tasks. ...
The WTO Global Trade Model, a quantitative trade model, is employed to project the impact on the global economy of the Covid‐19 pandemic with quantitative trade modelling. Because of the profound uncertainty about the duration of the pandemic and the containment measures, three scenarios are constructed, V‐shaped, U‐shaped, and L‐shaped recovery, corresponding with a duration of 3 months, 6 months and more than a year. The pandemic and containment measures are assumed to lead to a general reduction of labour supply, a rise in trade costs, and reductions in both demand and supply in sectors most affected by the containment measures. GDP and trade are projected to fall by respectively 5% and 11% in the V‐shaped and L‐shaped scenarios and trade by respectively 8% and 20%. The response of trade to the reduction in GDP, measured by the trade‐to‐GDP elasticity, is projected to rise as the crisis lasts longer. The reason is that a longer duration will lead to a larger drop in spending on durables which are highly tradable.
... Research on remote work indicates that working from home can be benefi cial for productivity. For example, a randomized experiment of a call center in China indicated that employees working from home during a nine-month period had an average 13% increase in performance and a 50% decrease in voluntary turn over (Bloom et al., 2015). Yet, working globally remotely during a crisis is diff er ent because of space/privacy constraints, health concerns, and child/elder care, which are typically not present when working from home. ...
... Many of the studies by Gajendran & Harrison (2007); Martin & MacDonnell (2012) indicated a positive relationship between job performance and Telecommuting. According to Bloom et al., (2015), most of the telecommuting studies are found to be cross-sectional, and at least two studies indicated a causal relationship between the telecommuting arrangement and the administrative workers' productivity. Baltes et al., (1999) indicated a causal relationship between telecommuting with performance and productivity. ...
Telecommuting can assist various organizations in complying with any ordinance during pandemic situations. This study investigates the link of adopting telecommuting in the organization during the crucial situation and how it enables the employee to perform, satisfy, committed to working with full effectiveness. Additionally, this research elicits other factors such as employee engagement and how it bolsters the job autonomy of individuals to control or shape professional dynamics connected with responsibility and the environment. The researcher has employed descriptive statistics, coefficient of correlation and one sample t-test method to analyze data, and the result indicated which shows a good relationship between employee commitment and job satisfaction during the adoption of telecommuting method in an organization. Also observed from the study, telecommuting can abreast routine work and official meetings during the current situations. It is also recommended that employees should ensure the work environment properly before adopt with telecommuting method.
... (i) students suffering from mental health problems in their professional lives as a consequence of their companies transitioning to a work-from-home approach (Farrer, 2019), impacting in longer work journeys (Bloom et al., 2015) and zoom-fatigue (Sklar, 2020); ...
Amid the COVID-19 crisis, universities were forced to change. Remote education became the norm and challenges appeared, such as on infrastructure, mental health, cognitive overload, and format adaptation. Beyond those changes, universities were demanded to become more entrepreneurial, developing technologies in response to COVID-19, and to train more entrepreneurial talent that could address worldwide scarcity.
Current research has already highlighted that Entrepreneurship Education is more effective when active-based. Students achieve meaningful learning through business planning, simulations, working at start-ups, leading student organizations, and building a real business. Thus, training students in practical through remote education worsens university challenges. Although the first responses are being published over entrepreneurship education in remote formats, the present literature is still limited.
This paper aims to answer the following question: “how to develop experiential learning entrepreneurship programs under the constraints of remote learning?” It is a Case Study of a Brazilian MBA program and the research method was Participatory Action-Research. The data were collected through classroom surveys (during 108 classes), in-depth interviews, and debriefing sessions. Results demonstrate effective strategies for dealing with cognitive overload at online environments, such as mixing synchronous and asynchronous formats, in-group live activities, peer-based exercises, and more. Resonating with current research on remote learning during COVID-19, challenges are related to infrastructure and personal limitations.
... De mate waarin de face-to-face interactie mogelijk is op het werk, heeft gevolgen voor de sociale steun die de medewerkers ontvangen (Marshall, Michaels, & Mulki, 2007;Mulki & Jaramillo, 2011;Wiesenfeld, Raghuram & Garud, 2001). Voor de medewerkers die hoofdzakelijk virtueel werken kan een gebrek aan face-to-face contacten zorgen voor gevoelens van eenzaamheid (Bloom, Liang, Roberts, & Ying, 2015) en bestaat er het risico dat zij geïsoleerd raken. De virtuele teamleden geven aan dat ze zich bezorgd voelen niet meer zichtbaar te zijn voor de organisatie (Watad & DiSanzo, 2000). ...
Teams in de HvA bevinden zich in een unieke situatie door de COVID-19 uitbraak. De digitale en sociale transformatie die als gevolg van die uitbraak in gang is gezet, heeft invloed op het professioneel handelen en het welzijn van HvA teams, zo blijkt uit eerder kwalitatief onderzoek onder 49 HvA professionals, uitgevoerd tussen mei en juli 2020 (van Middelkoop, Bay, van den Berg, van Berkel, Smit, van Woudenberg-Swicegood, 2020).
Welke voordelen biedt virtueel samenwerken in teams, volgens de geïnterviewde HvA professionals? Waar lopen de HvA teams tegen aan als het gaat over virtueel samenwerken? Hoe los je als team knelpunten op en hoe kan je als leidinggevende dat faciliteren? In dit artikel beschrijven we veelgenoemde voor- en nadelen van het virtueel samenwerken in teams, die naar voren komen uit ons onderzoek en uit een verkenning van de wetenschappelijke literatuur rondom dit thema. We geven per nadeel ook tips over hoe je hier als in de praktijk mee om kunt gaan. We schreven dit artikel voor medewerkers die in een team werken en voor leidinggevenden.
... For organizations the benefits include a reduction in office footprint thereby reducing costs (Church,2015) increased productivity (Bloom et al.,2015;Dick et al., 2020) reduced staff sick time and attrition. Organizations can also bring together people "from wherever they are to wherever they need to be, almost instantly" (Horwitz et al.,2006, p 474) thereby accessing a wider talent pool for hard to source specialist skills (Handy,1995;Raghuram et al. 2001;Gajendran and Harrison 2006). ...
One of the most challenging episodes in an organisation's life is an organisational crisis (König et al., 2020). Organisational crises stir up strong emotions, such as anxiety, panic, and distress. However organisational crisis management, like many other management issues, is being reshaped by information technology (IT) (Nan et al,.2014). At the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in unexpected changes to the lives of people across the globe (World Health Organization, 2020). With no effective treatments or vaccines available (Salari et al., 2020), organisations around the globe encouraged workers to work from home where possible in order to support the essential behaviours of self-isolation and social distancing. Iansiti and Richards (2020) noted that in a matter of days, almost any process that could be rapidly digitized was virtualized, with employees across the globe moving from onsite to home working. This in turn mitigated the disruption to business as usual for many organisations, during the pandemic. Aim The aim of this study is focused on the challenges and practice of wholesale moves by organisations to remote working. Objectives The findings of this study will contribute to the lack of knowledge on remote working in a crisis situation and in particular what are the critical success factors when implementing remote working. Research Question-What are the factors considered most critical when working from home during COVID-19
... Penelitian dilakukan pada bulan Maret 2020 ketika wabah Covid-19 sedang pandemi. Tempat penelitian yang pada awal rencana akan dilakukan di sekolah masing-masing, tetapi dengan mewabahnya Covid-19 menyebabkan pengambilan data penelitian dilakukan di rumah masing-masing (WFH) responden secara daring (Bloom, Liang, Roberts, & Ying, 2015). ...
The situation in the Covid-19 era was directed at every online integrated learning. The purpose of this research is to produce SISCA media that is integrated with web and oriented GC for high school and vocational high school learning. This type of quantitative research uses the Four-D (4D) model development method which is more focused on development. Samples were taken by purposive sampling and considered as research subjects, represented by high school and vocational high school students. The research instrument, in the form of a student response questionnaire, was used to collect data before and after learning. The analysis technique uses a Likert scale, and the results obtained using SISCA media on learning produce positive changes with an average difference for the three aspects that are responded to very significantly.
... A substantial recent literature has studied the efficiency of working from home.Bloom et al. (2015) provide evidence from a within-firm RCT that homeworking increases the productivity of call-centre workers by up to 22%.Mas and Pallais (2017) find that the average call-centre worker is willing to pay 8% to work from home. Although,Battiston et al. (Forthcoming) provides evidence that face-to-face communication improves productivity. ...
The Covid-19 health crisis has led to a substantial increase in work done from home, which shifts economic activity across geographic space. We refer to this shift as a Zoomshock. The Zoomshock has implications for locally consumed services; much of the clientele of restaurants, coffee bars, pubs, hair stylists, health clubs, and the like located near workplaces is transferred to establishments located near where people live. In this paper we measure the Zoomshock at a very granular level for UK neighbourhoods. We establish three important empirical facts. First, the Zoomshock is large; many workers can work-from-home and live in a different neighbourhood than they work. Second, the Zoomshock is very heterogeneous; economic activity is decreasing in productive city centres and increasing residential suburbs. Third, the Zoomshock moves workers away from neighbourhoods with a large supply of locally consumed services to neighbourhoods where the supply of these services is relatively scarce. We discuss the implications for aggregate employment and local economic recovery following the Covid-19 health crisis.
... Working hours for both full-time and part-time workers declined substantially (10%-20%) from April to May (Fig. 6f). Overwork and commuting are well-recognised risk factors for suicide, particularly among the working population in Japan 49 ; hence, reduced working hours and work-from-home policies could have improved people's productivity, life satisfaction, and mental health [50][51][52] . This explanation is consistent with our finding of the largest decline in suicide rates among adults during the SOE (male adults, IRR = 0.79, 95% CI 0.73 to 0.85; female adults, IRR = 0.73, 95% CI 0.65 to 0.83), which comprise mainly the working population. ...
There is increasing concern that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic could harm psychological health and exacerbate suicide risk. Here, based on month-level records of suicides covering the entire Japanese population in 1,848 administrative units, we assessed whether suicide mortality changed during the pandemic. Using difference-in-difference estimation, we found that monthly suicide rates declined by 14% during the first 5 months of the pandemic (February to June 2020). This could be due to a number of complex reasons, including the government’s generous subsidies, reduced working hours and school closure. By contrast, monthly suicide rates increased by 16% during the second wave (July to October 2020), with a larger increase among females (37%) and children and adolescents (49%). Although adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic may remain in the long term, its modifiers (such as government subsidies) may not be sustained. Thus, effective suicide prevention—particularly among vulnerable populations—should be an important public health consideration.
... Remote work thus means professional duties performed from home or any location outside of formal employer's premises (such as a café or a co-working space) on a full-time or near full-time basis (four or more days a week), very often [55,96,97]. The increasing prevalence of full-time remote work is changing the dynamics in local contexts and creates new paths in regional development [98]. ...
The Industry 4.0 Revolution that is taking place nowadays means that organizations face
not only new opportunities, but also challenges related to the identification of their role in creating a modern smart world. The economies of many countries are under the significant and growing influence of various types of organizations, not only strong international business corporations, but also, more and more often, smaller but intelligent ones called smart organizations IR 4.0. Due to their unique characteristics, intelligent organizations are better able than others to cope with technological breakthroughs, social, and cultural problems as well as to compete effectively and
develop in an environmentally sustainable way. With their growing potential, they are strengthening the economies of their countries of origin and daily operation. Their growing role is also visible in the processes of shaping competitiveness and achieving the sustainable development objectives of the European Union (EU). The countries that are able to organize an environment on their territory that is conducive to the smart organization’s development are clear examples not only of a high market
competitiveness, but also of a dynamically growing commitment to the effective implementation of the challenges associated with the 17 objectives of sustainable development of the contemporary EU, according to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This allows for a conclusion that the identification of the key factors for a smart organization’s development makes it possible to monitor
and provide targeted support for the development not only of these organizations, but also for the competitiveness and sustainability of individual countries, both from the EU and other regions of the world. In light of the above, the aim of this article is therefore to propose an effective tool to monitor the use of power of smart organizations in the processes of building the competitiveness and sustainable development of countries, with particular reference to the EU. To achieve this objective, we constructed a synthetic power of smart organizations index (PSOI) based on previously collected data from EUROSTAT. This tool allows for the integration of micro (organization level) and
macro (country level) economic aspects into a single construct. Based on the analysis of its results, countries wishing to actively engage in the development of their own and the EU’s smartness and sustainability can be offered several more or less intense navigation paths to market success, based on the development of smart organizations.
... Employers and employees may underestimate the viability of WFH without any actual experience. Bloom et al. (2014) document, for example, how a temporary experiment showing meaningful productivity gains lead to the permanent adoption of WFH by a Chinese call center. ...
... Nick Bloom and colleagues ran an experiment with call center workers who had expressed interest in working from home and found that, while the average effect of doing so was positive, some people were negatively affected. Those who were less productive at home were more likely to return to the office after the experiment ended [17]. A different experiment at the US Patent Office also found positive average effects, particularly for those who chose to move to areas with lower cost of living [32]. ...
We now turn to understanding the impact that COVID-19 had on the personal productivity and well-being of information workers as their work practices were impacted by remote work. This chapter overviews people's productivity, satisfaction, and work patterns, and shows that the challenges and benefits of remote work are closely linked. Looking forward, the infrastructure surrounding work will need to evolve to help people adapt to the challenges of remote and hybrid work.
... Research results of employees working on flexible working hours, incl. remotely, show an increase in the level of job satisfaction and growth in labor productivity [14,15]. ...
The challenges of higher education that the world faced during the pandemic led to an emergency temporary transfer of faculty to a distance learning format. The article reveals the results of the analysis of socio-psychological problems that university teachers faced during the transition to remote employment. The work is based on a content analysis of previous studies of the issue, as well as data from a formalized online survey of faculty members of universities. The formalized survey was attended by 169 representatives of the teaching staff of universities in 10 cities of Russia. The article presents the main opportunities and disadvantages of remote employment and distance learning in higher education from the point of view of teachers. As a result of the study, the authors formulated the key opportunities and disadvantages of distance employment and identified the key social and psychological problems that require attention when organizing the activities of teachers. The labor market is changing, the requirements for the competencies of university professors are changing, it is necessary to systematically, strategically introduce changes by the administration when switching to a remote work format with a focus on the social and psychological well-being of employees.
... Individuals who are totally quarantined during the pandemic might develop higher sense of mattering because they might be relying on social media and electronic communication to conduct their social interaction; and higher engagement in social media improves the state self-esteem [26] and mattering [27]. The quarantine situation might also alter the development of SSE among employees; first of all, when they do not go to the workplace, there will be a lower chance to experience social inclusion, such as lunch with colleagues, happy hours, and other types of impromptu social gathering, which might lead to lower SSE [15,28,29], for instance, it was reported that WFH leads workers to develop a sense of loneliness [24,30,31] and they are more likely to feel excluded compared to on-site workers [32]. ...
Past studies suggested that the sense of mattering tend to be a robust predictor of work self-efficacy, even when controlling for strong variables such as state self-esteem. This current study aimed to investigate whether the aforementioned suggested still holds among working adults who had to work from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia, where the government enforced movement control order (MCO), a semi-quarantine policy where individuals can only travel within 10 kilometer radius of their respective homes. We hypothesized that the state self-esteem will fully mediate the link between mattering and work self-efficacy during the period of WFH, and that trait extraversion will moderate the mediation. In the 5th week of the MCO, our data was gathered from 109 urban working adults in Malaysia who had to WFH by employing General Mattering Scale, State Self-Esteem Scale, Remote Work Self Efficacy Measure, and the extraversion facet in Big Five Inventory. The result of bootstrap analyses with 5000 samples using PROCESS Macro Model 8 suggested that state self-esteem mediated partially mediated the association of mattering and work self-efficacy among individuals at all levels of extraversion. Discussion, limitations and suggestions are provided in the end of the paper.
... 43 We find no statistically significantly differences across advertised treatment arms. 40 We follow Bloom et al. (2015) in using the Maslach Burnout Index to capture job satisfaction and the Clark-Tellgen Index of positive and negative affect to capture the overall attitude of teachers. 41 We follow the phrasing used in the surveys run by Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2011a). ...
This paper reports on a two-tiered experiment designed to separately identify the selection and effort margins of pay-for-performance (P4P). At the recruitment stage, teacher labor markets were randomly assigned to a 'pay-for-percentile' or fixed-wage contract. Once recruits were placed, an unexpected, incentive-compatible, school-level re-randomization was performed, so that some teachers who applied for a fixed-wage contract ended up being paid by P4P, and vice versa. By the second year of the study, the within-year effort effect of P4P was 0.16 standard deviations of pupil learning, with the total effect rising to 0.20 standard deviations after allowing for selection.
... Different studies state that the telecommuting has a positive impact on productivity and it helps improve the productivity of employees and task performance (Allen et al., 2015;Bloom et al., 2014;Crandall & Gao, 2005;Gajendran, Harrison, & Delaney-Klinger, 2015). It is also proved by different researchers that the job satisfaction is increased when telecommuting due to autonomy and ability of job control (Tremblay, 2002;Kelliher, & Anderson, 2008). ...
Abstract: State Owned Business Enterprises (SOBEs) have become a discussion topic in the development agenda of any developing country due to generating of substantial losses. In such a context, how an entity, Airport and Aviation Services (Sri Lanka) Ltd (AASL), incorporated in 1982 under the Companies Act and empowered by the Civil Aviation Act is year by year continuously increasing its’ revenue and profitability hitting almost Rs.10Bn profits for the year 2017. Therefore, it is worthwhile to unearth as what made AASL into such significant case in Sri Lanka while having diverse administrative, statutory, structural governmental backgrounds in which typical state company operates. According to the research findings and theoretical underpinnings, continuous performance of an organisation is defined in multiple perspectives and it is literary connected with leadership execution and sustainability. For this study purpose continuous performance is defined in terms of financial point of view. Further
continuous performance is clearly identified as an outcome of predominantly execution of
leadership styles. Based on the outcome, continuous performance, while having many driving factors, leadership execution factor was highlighted. AASL, being a state company
incorporated to serve narrow market segment in early 1980s, subsequently, spanning from 2009 to 2018 depicted exponential growth with continuous improvements in both financial and operational outcomes. The case study has demonstrated how continuous performance of AASL achieved since 2009. Execution of triple leadership styles throughout the period has mainly contributed to achieve the same. All other loss making state entities must re-visit the ways and means of transforming into profitable businesses. Such transformation will bring immense valuable positive social externalities to a developing economy like Sri Lanka.
Keywords: Continuous Performance; Leadership Execution; Transactional; Democratic;
Bureaucratic
... Geographic inequality would then diminish. However, it remains unclear how large-scale, fulltime remote work would affect productivity (Choudhury et al. 2020, Bloom et al. 2015, and in particular learning and innovation (Sandvik et al. 2020, Cornelissen et al. 2017). More broadly, large cities have a long history of adapting to overcome challenges such as epidemics or the decline of manufacturing districts (Glaeser 2020). ...
We discuss regional disparities in economic performance and living standards. We first set out some key facts, and provide a conceptual framework to help analyze whether such disparities are efficient, or instead reflect market and/or policy failures. We examine whether policy attempts to reduce regional disparities necessarily involve a trade-off between equity and efficiency. We then investigate whether policymakers should focus on boosting the economic performance of lagging regions—or, conversely, accept the presence of regional disparities, and instead assist households in lagging regions through transfer payments, investments in education, health, and other basic services, and by facilitating out-migration.
... Some of the studies reveal the impact on productivity for specific professions (Dutscher, 2012;Bloom et al., 2015;Battiston et al., 2017). These studies suggest that productivity from e-working depends on the characteristics of the occupations and specific tasks are undertaken. ...
E-working undergoes a facelift. Its present extent and format are extending to (re)define the future of workplaces. The consequences of the sudden arrival COVID-19 pandemic are not fully understood yet, because a radical evolution of work is still running. Over the past few months, nearly every organization seems to have implemented its e-working practices. Some of them contradict each other, which may lead to confusion and disharmony. It opens the question of creating and developing optimal e-worker-friendly environments. On 11 May 2020, the authors of the paper launched an online survey to gather important data to determine how workers of different subsidiaries of an international organization were coping with this sudden change. In 154 responses, they shared their feelings on the recent workplace challenges as well as future perspectives. In the survey, the respondents and their workplaces confirmed their quick adaption to e-working. More than half of them feel more productive at home than in the office. They indicate their preference for a smart casual dress code. More than one-third of respondents would like to extend working from home to a longer period (1-2 years). They see their subsidiaries not having developed a return-to-work strategy as a problem. Another big issue is the blurred line between personal and work life. Data provide strong evidence of the benefits of e-working and constitute a set of recommendations for this type of work in the future. The conclusions have been generalized to a model that can guide organizations in managing their e-working balanced and positively expanding.
... Academic research on telework has yielded ambivalent results when examining its effects for employees [18]. Main benefits comprise increased productivity and autonomy, balanced work and private life, reduced commute, reduced overheads for employers, and an increased skill base [19,20]. Reported problems are, amongst others, social isolation, presenteeism, lack of support, career disadvantages, blurring boundaries between work and private life, and technostress [19,21]. ...
In March 2020, many organizations requested their employees to work from home to reduce their employees' risk of a COVID-19 infection. Research has suggested that working from home increases perceived stress due to blurring boundaries between work and private life. We examine whether this finding also holds for "enforced working from home" (EWFH) due to COVID-19 based on a four-week diary study in April and May 2020 with 37 participants from a German university. We suggest psychological detachment and communication overload as explaining variables for the relationship between EWFH and perceived stress. Our data show that EWFH leads neither to an inability to detach nor to communication overload. Similarly, EWFH does not increase participants’ stress level. The findings show that working from home is a viable option for the future and that specifics of the EWFH setting, such as wide organizational support, can improve the working from home experience.
... In the family, the core unit of society, there is strict gender division in the division of labor. Generally, in terms of the family division of labor, women are mainly responsible for housework, while men are mainly responsible for going out to work (Besamusca et al., 2015;Bloom et al., 2015). In addition, most men still hope that women can play the traditional role of a good wife and good mother, and this expectation has an important impact on women's gender consciousness (Corrigall and Konrad, 2007;Pedersen, 2016), which will also affect women's own class identification. ...
In advocating gender equality today, we should not only pay attention to women's social status but also call for the women's psychological identification of class equality. What dominates female class identification? To answer this question, based on the data of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2015, this study constructs a female class identity framework from five aspects: the mother's intergenerational influence, female personal characteristics, lifestyle, gender consciousness, and spouse status. In this study, the ordered logit model is used to empirically analyze the impact of various factors on female class identification, and the results show the following: (1) gender consciousness has a significant impact on female class identification. (2) Lifestyle has a significant impact on the situation of having a spouse. (3) Spouse status has a significant positive effect on female class identification. But (4) the mother's intergenerational influence has no effect on female class identification. Therefore, this paper suggests that we should improve laws and regulations to protect women's normal rights, encourage women to establish an independent and self-improvement character, and enhance the class consciousness of women, especially rural women, in order to achieve the overall improvement of female class and psychological identification.
... The global situation, coupled with restrictive governments' measures following the mitigation of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, has further expanded the home office space. This method has significant advantages; in many cases considerable saving in commuting time and cost [1,2]. There is also a direct saving in commuting times, potentially allowing more time to be devoted to productive activities [3]. ...
This article deals with commuting to and from work of workers in Slovakia as a part of traveling and its impact on private life of commuters. It provides a more comprehensive view on the socio-demographic determinants which affect the travel mode choice. Furthermore, the study offers several evaluations of the impact on the subjective well-being of commuters. The aim of the article is to review demographic and economic determinants influencing the travel mode choice and to determine its impact on the subjective well-being of respondents. On a sample of approximately 1000 economically active individuals by using several statistical tests (Nominal Logistic Regression, Fisher’s Exact Test, Mann-Whitney Test, Cochran Test, McNemar Test), we identified the determinants affecting the travel mode choice of respondents, including commuting time costs, commuting financial costs, income of respondents, education, gender, type of employment and place of work. This study has also showed that respondents are the most satisfied when commuting by bicycle or on foot and the most dissatisfied when commuting by using public transport. These facts, among others, should be reflected by the creation of sustainable and “green” transport infrastructure in Slovakia.
... Как показывают социологические исследования и полевые эксперименты, режим удалённой занятости имеет свои достоинства и недостатки как для работников, так и для работодателей. Например, в одном из таких экспериментов около 1 000 из порядка 16 000 сотрудников крупнейшей китайской туристической компании девять месяцев проработали в дистанционном режиме (Bloom et al. 2015). По итогам наблюдения был зафиксирован рост продуктивности удалённых работников, который сложился из увеличения полезного рабочего времени из-за меньшего количества перерывов и дней потери трудоспособности по причине болезни, а также большей интенсивности работы -возросло количество звонков на единицу времени. ...
... The effect of WFH on productivity is theoretically ambiguous, while empirical evidences are mixed. Bloom et al. (2014) suggest that WFH increase the productivity of workers based on a randomized controlled trial in a large Chinese travel agency. Monteiro et al. (2019) find the opposite effects using a large panel of Portuguese firms. ...
The Covid-19 crisis has forced great societal changes, including forcing many to work from home (WFH) in an effort to limit the spread of the disease. The ability to work from home has long been considered a perk, but we have few estimates of how many jobs are actually possible to be performed from home. This paper proposes a method to estimate the share of these jobs. For each occupation, we obtain a WFH friendly measure by asking respondents from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to evaluate whether the corresponding tasks can be performed from home based on the descriptions from the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO-08) standard. The share of WFH friendly jobs in an economy can then be estimated by combining these measures with the labor statistics on occupational employments. Using Norway as an illustrating example, we find that approximately 38% of Norwegian jobs can be performed from home. The Norwegian results also suggest that the pandemic and the government’s attempts to mitigate this crisis may have a quite uneven impact on the working population. Those who are already disadvantaged are often less likely to have jobs that can be performed from home.
Research Summary
An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work‐from‐anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work‐from‐home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work‐from‐anywhere (WFA) programs offer both temporal and geographic flexibility. WFA should be viewed as a nonpecuniary benefit likely to be preferred by workers who would derive greater utility by moving from their current geographic location to their preferred location. We study the effects of WFA on productivity at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and exploit a natural experiment in which the implementation of WFA was driven by negotiations between managers and the patent examiners' union, leading to exogeneity in the timing of individual examiners' transition from a work‐from‐home to a work‐from‐anywhere program. This transition resulted in a 4.4% increase in output without affecting the incidence of rework. We also report results related to a plausible mechanism: an increase in observable effort as the worker transitions from a WFH to a WFA program. We employ illustrative field interviews, micro‐data on locations, and machine learning analysis to shed further light on geographic flexibility, and summarize worker, firm, and economy‐wide implications of provisioning WFA.
Managerial Summary
Work‐from‐anywhere is an emerging form of remote work, in which workers are awarded geographic flexibility, that is, the flexibility to choose where to live. We study the productivity effects of workers moving from a work‐from‐home (WFH) to a work‐from‐anywhere (WFA) regime at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that the transition from WFH to WFA resulted in a 4.4% increase in employee output, with no increase in rework. We also report an increase in employee effort after the transition to WFA and document qualitative evidence on how geographic flexibility benefits individual workers and the USPTO (e.g., real estate savings).
The spread of the novel coronavirus disease caused schools in Japan to close to cope with the pandemic. In response to this, parents of students were obliged to care for their children during the daytime when they were usually at school. Does the increase in burden of childcare influence parents mental health? Based on short panel data from mid-March to mid-April 2020, we explored how school closures influenced the mental health of parents with school-aged children. Using the fixed effects model, we found that school closures lead to students mothers suffering from worse mental health than other females, while the fathers mental health did not differ from other males. This tendency was only observed for less educated mothers who had children attending primary school, but not those attending junior high school. The contribution of this paper is to show that school closures increased the inequality of mental health between genders and the educational background of parents.
Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people refrained from going out, started working from home (WFH), and suspended work or lost their jobs. This study examines how such pandemic-related changes in work and life patterns were associated with depressive symptoms.
Methods
An online survey among participants who use a health app called CALO mama was conducted from 30 April to 8 May 2020 in Japan. Participants consisted of 2846 users (1150 men (mean age=50.3) and 1696 women (mean age=43.0)) who were working prior to the government declaration of a state of emergency (7 April 2020). Their daily steps from 1 January to 13 May 2020 recorded by an accelerometer in their mobile devices were linked to their responses. Depressive symptoms were assessed using the Two-Question Screen.
Results
On average, participants took 1143.8 (95% CI −1557.3 to −730.2) fewer weekday steps during the declaration period (from 7 April to 13 May). Depressive symptoms were positively associated with female gender (OR=1.58, 95% CI 1.34 to 1.87), decreased weekday steps (OR=1.22, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.45) and increased working hours (OR=1.73, 95% CI 1.32 to 2.26). Conversely, starting WFH was negatively associated with depressive symptoms (OR=0.83, 95% CI 0.69 to 0.99).
Conclusions
Decreased weekday steps during the declaration period were associated with increased odds of depressive symptoms, but WFH may mitigate the risk in the short term. Further studies on the longitudinal effects of WFH on health are needed.
At present, COVID-19 has caused a possible paradigm shift in education, especially in education delivery for higher educational and learning institutions. To align with the national government and relevant national/international authorities' policies and to avoid the spread of the virus, educational institutions in many nations have decided to temporarily suspend the traditional classroom-based education and replace it with online-based education. This study aims at exploring the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and obligatory remote working on work-life balance, mental health and productivity of faculty members working in higher education institutions (HEI). The study is exploratory and uses a qualitative approach using an online survey strategy to include voices of faculty members from different countries. While the results of this study indicate both positive and negative effects of obligatory remote working on faculty members' work-life balance, well-being and productivity at the same time our findings indicate that university administration must pay heed to address concerns presented in the results.
As women have the potential to bring unique perspectives to the workplace, the under-representation of women in STEM occupations is a severe limitation to global advancement through research and innovation. Workplace utilization of computer-mediated communication (CMC) may impact common barriers faced by women in STEM, such as stereotypes, a “chilly” workplace climate, lack of social support and mentorship opportunities, and work-family conflict. As organizations shift further into the use of virtual communication, it is essential to take advantage of CMC as a way to facilitate gender equality in the workplace while simultaneously mitigating barriers workplace CMC may present for women in STEM. The potential implications of workplace virtual communication, virtual teams, e-mentoring, cyber incivility, and telecommuting for women in STEM careers are discussed.
In this study, we used Turkish HLFS survey and four work contexts data obtained from various sources to obtain wage returns to working from home, exposure to disease, physical proximity and essential jobs. Our findings revealed that at least 22 per cent wage premium for those who are working from home which consist of 24 per cent total jobs. While those who are likely to exposure to disease and physical proximity are 16 per cent and 56 per cent of total jobs respectively, they face significant negative wage returns in the pre-crisis period. These findings imply that during and after the pandemic, stay home orders and social distance measures might deepen existing social inequalities of Turkey. Finally, essential job intensity to battle COVID-19 also reduces wage level by 12.5 per cent. Hence, to mitigate the consequences of pandemic related with inequality, we argue that
occupation-based view has an important role to direct income support.
El Teletrabajo es una práctica que lleva varias décadas desarrollándose y ha llevado desde el trabajo parcial en casa a el trabajo que no se realiza en un espacio determinado. Este proceso se ha dado de la mano del desarrollo de la tecnología tanto en la vertiente de los sistemas de comunicación como de las plataformas digitales. Al mismo tiempo este proceso ha implicado la adopción de estructura flexibles en el interior de las organizaciones. Se han documentado efectos positivos de esta práctica sobre la productividad, reducciones de costos y una mayor satisfacción laboral. Sin embargo, la adopción de esta forma de trabajo solo es posible para ciertas organizaciones y empleados con acceso a equipos y el conocimiento requerido para el manejo de equipos que les permitan desarrollar su trabajo de manera remota. Al mismo tiempo el teletrabajo supone ciertos inconvenientes, sobre todo lo que se refiere a la coordinación, motivación, supervisión, desarrollo de trabajo colaborativo y el liderazgo dentro de las organizaciones. La pandemia de Covid-19 contribuyó a acelerar este proceso y a la adopción de esta práctica. Sin embargo esto no se dio en las condiciones más apropiadas y muchas organizaciones se vieron en la necesidad de adoptar el trabajo remoto en condiciones no planeadas. Una vez que termine la emergencia sanitaria el teletrabajo continuará siendo utilizado por una mayor cantidad de organizaciones por lo que se puede decir que el teletrabajo llegó para quedarse y seguir creciendo.
Schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life may help employees
manage the work-family interface. Existing data and research designs, however, have made
it difficult to conclusively identify the effects of these work resources. This analysis utilizes
a group-randomized trial in which some units in an information technology workplace were
randomly assigned to participate in an initiative, called STAR, that targeted work practices,
interactions, and expectations by (1) training supervisors on the value of demonstrating
support for employees’ personal lives and (2) prompting employees to reconsider when
and where they work. We find statistically significant, although modest, improvements in
employees’ work-family conflict and family time adequacy, and larger changes in schedule
control and supervisor support for family and personal life. We find no evidence that this
intervention increased work hours or perceived job demands, as might have happened
with increased permeability of work across time and space. Subgroup analyses suggest the
intervention brought greater benefits to employees more vulnerable to work-family conflict.
This study uses a rigorous design to investigate deliberate organizational changes and their
effects on work resources and the work-family interface, advancing our understanding of the
impact of social structures on individual lives.
Performance rankings are a very common workplace management practice. Behavioral theories suggest that providing performance rankings to employees, even without pecuniary consequences, may directly shape effort due to the rank's effect on self-image. In a three-year randomized control trial with full-time design where I vary (i) whether to privately inform employees about their performance rank; and (ii) whether to give benchmarks, i.e. data on current performance required to be in the top 10%, 25%, and 50%. The salespeople's compensation is only based on absolute performance via a high-powered commission scheme in which rankings convey no direct additional financial benefits. There are two important innovations in this experiment. First, prior to the start of the experiment all salespeople were told their performance ranking. Second, employees operate in a multi-tasking environment where they can sell multiple brands. There are four key results: First, removing rank feedback actually increases sales performance by 11%, or 1/10th of a standard deviation. Second, only men (not women) change their performance. Third, adding benchmarks to rank feedback significantly raises performance, but it is not significantly different from providing no feedback. Fourth, as predicted by the multi-tasking model, the treatment effect increases with the scope for effort substitution across furniture brands as employees switch their effort to other tasks when their rank is worse than expected.
This paper analyzes a marked change in the evolution of the U.S. wage structure over the past fifteen years: divergent trends in upper-tail (90/50) and lower-tail (50/10) wage inequality. We document that wage inequality in the top half of distribution has displayed an unchecked and rather smooth secular rise for the last 25 years (since 1980). Wage inequality in the bottom half of the distribution also grew rapidly from 1979 to 1987, but it has ceased growing (and for some measures actually narrowed) since the late 1980s. Furthermore we find that occupational employment growth shifted from monotonically increasing in wages (education) in the 1980s to a pattern of more rapid growth in jobs at the top and bottom relative to the middles of the wage (education) distribution in the 1990s. We characterize these patterns as the %u201Cpolarization%u201D of the U.S. labor market, with employment polarizing into high-wage and low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-wage work. We show how a model of computerization in which computers most strongly complement the non-routine (abstract) cognitive tasks of high-wage jobs, directly substitute for the routine tasks found in many traditional middle-wage jobs, and may have little direct impact on non-routine manual tasks in relatively low-wage jobs can help explain the observed polarization of the U.S. labor market.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium-sized firms in the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin's Q, and survival rates. Management practices also display significant cross-country differences, with U.S. firms on average better managed than European firms, and significant within-country differences, with a long tail of extremely badly managed firms. We find that poor management practices are more prevalent when product market competition is weak and/or when family-owned firms pass management control down to the eldest sons (primogeniture).
This national benchmarking report of the U.S. telecommunications services industry traces the tumultuous changes in management and workforce practices and performance in the sector over the last 5 years. This is a follow-up report to our 1998 study. At that time, when the industry was booming, we conducted a national survey of establishments in the industry. In 2003, we returned to do a second national survey of the industry, this time in a sector that was recovering from one of the worst recessions in its history.
We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an
exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance
pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that
managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of workers’ productivity
through two channels. First, managers respond to incentives by targeting their
efforts towards more able workers, implying that both the mean and the dispersion
increase. Second, managers select out the least able workers, implying that
the mean increases but the dispersion may decrease. In our field experiment we
find that the introduction of managerial performance pay raises both the mean
and dispersion of worker productivity. Analysis of individual level productivity
data shows that managers target their effort towards high ability workers, and
the least able workers are less likely to be selected into employment. These results
highlight the interplay between the provision of managerial incentives and earnings
inequality among lower-tier workers.
We examine the effects of urban form and public transit supply on the commute mode choices and annual vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) of households living in 114 urban areas in 1990. The probability of driving to work is lower the higher are population centrality and rail miles supplied and the lower is road density. Population centrality, jobs-housing balance, city shape, and road density have a significant effect on annual household VMTs. Although individual elasticities are small absolute values (≤0.10), moving sample households from a city with the characteristics of Atlanta to a city with the characteristics of Boston reduces annual VMTs by 25%. Copyright (c) 2005 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Because minorities typically fare poorly on standardized tests, job testing is thought to pose an equality-efficiency trade-off:
testing improves selection but reduces minority hiring. We develop a conceptual framework to assess when this trade-off is
likely to apply and evaluate the evidence for such a trade-off using hiring and productivity data from a national retail firm
whose 1,363 stores switched from informal to test-based worker screening over the course of one year. We document that testing
yielded more productive hires at this firm—raising mean and median tenure by 10% or more. Consistent with prior research,
minorities performed worse on the test. Yet, testing had no measurable impact on minority hiring, and productivity gains were
uniformly large among minority and nonminority hires. These results suggest that job testing raised the precision of screening
without introducing additional negative information about minority applicants, most plausibly because both the job test and
the informal screen that preceded it were unbiased.
The authors combine measures of urban form and public transit supply for 114 urbanized areas with the 1990 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey to address two questions: (1) How do measures of urban form, including city shape, road density, the spatial distribution of population, and jobs-housing balance affect the annual miles driven and commute mode choices of U.S. households? (2) How does the supply of public transportation (annual route miles supplied and availability of transit stops) affect miles driven and commute mode choice? The authors find that jobs-housing balance, population centrality, and rail miles supplied significantly reduce the probability of driving to work in cities with some rail transit. Population centrality and jobs-housing balance have a significant impact on annual household vehicle miles traveled (VMT), as do city shape, road density, and (in rail cities) annual rail route miles supplied. The elasticity of VMT with respect to each variable is small, on the order of 0.10-0.20 in absolute value. However, changing several measures of form simultaneously can reduce annual VMT significantly. Moving the sample households from a city with the characteristics of Atlanta to a city with the characteristics of Boston reduces annual VMT by 25 percent.
Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation. Employees are 'rational cheaters,' who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the perceived marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost. Managers respond to this decision calculus by implementing monitoring and incentive pay practices that lessen the attraction of shirking. This 'rational cheater model' is not the only model of opportunistic behavior, and indeed is viewed skeptically by human resource practitioners and by many non-economists who study employment relationships. We investigate the 'rational cheater model' using data from a double-blind field experiment that allows us to observe the effect of experimentally-induced variations in monitoring on employee opportunism. The experiment is unique in that it occurs in the context of an ongoing employment relationship, i.e., with the firm's employees producing output as usual under the supervision of their front-line managers. The results indicate that a significant fraction of employees behave roughly in ccordance with the 'rational cheater model.' We also find, however, that a substantial proportion of employees do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate. This heterogeneity is related to employee assessments about their general treatment by the emp loyer.
In this paper, we exploit establishment-level data to examine the relationship between microeconomic productivity dynamics and aggregate productivity growth. After synthesizing the evidence from recent studies, we conduct our own analysis using establishment-level data for U.S. manufacturing establishments as well for selected service industries. The use of longitudinal micro data on service sector establishments is one of the novel features of our analysis. Our main findings are summarized as follows: (i) the contribution of reallocation of outputs and inputs from less productive to more productive establishments plays a significant role in accounting for aggregate productivity growth; (ii) for the selected service industries considered, the contribution of net entry (more productive entering establishments displacing less productive exiting establishments) is dominant; (iii) the contribution of net entry to aggregate productivity growth is disproportionate and is increasing in the horizon over which the changes are measured since longer horizon yields greater differentials from selection and learning effects; (iv) the contribution of reallocation to aggregate productivity growth varies over time (e.g. is cyclically sensitive) and industries and is somewhat sensitive to subtle differences in measurement and decomposition methodologies.
This paper studies the implications for inflation dynamics of introducing non-price competition into a New Keynesian model featuring both nominal rigidities, which are in the form of staggered prices, and real rigidities, which are in the form of strategic complementarities in price setting. Under very general assumptions, we show that the presence of non-price competition among firms dampens the overall degree of real rigidities in the economy, thereby increasing the sensitivity of inflation to movements in real marginal costs. Because of this property, our analysis provides additional insights to the existing theories on real rigidities, showing that the strong linkage between real rigidities and the sensitivity of inflation to real marginal costs that has been found in previous works is not robust across alternative assumptions about inter-firms competition.
Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips stock price has been predicted using the difference between core and headline CPI in the United States. Linear trends in the CPI difference allow accurate prediction of the prices at a five to ten-year horizon.
We analyze the consequences of control on motivation in an experimental principalagent game, where the principal can control the agent by implementing a minimum performance requirement before the agent chooses a productive activity. Our results show that control entails hidden costs since most agents reduce their performance as a response to the principal?s controlling decision. Overall, the effect of control on the principal?s payoff is nonmonotonic. When asked for their emotional perception of control, most agents who react negatively say that they perceive the controlling decision as a signal of distrust and a limitation of their choice autonomy. (JEL D82, Z13)
This paper analyzes a marked change in the evolution of the U.S. wage structure over the past fifteen years: divergent trends in upper-tail (90/50) and lower-tail (50/10) wage inequality. We document that wage inequality in the top half of distribution has displayed an unchecked and rather smooth secular rise for the last 25 years (since 1980). Wage inequality in the bottom half of the distribution also grew rapidly from 1979 to 1987, but it has ceased growing (and for some measures actually narrowed) since the late 1980s. Furthermore we find that occupational employment growth shifted from monotonically increasing in wages (education) in the 1980s to a pattern of more rapid growth in jobs at the top and bottom relative to the middles of the wage (education) distribution in the 1990s. We characterize these patterns as the %u201Cpolarization%u201D of the U.S. labor market, with employment polarizing into high-wage and low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-wage work. We show how a model of computerization in which computers most strongly complement the non-routine (abstract) cognitive tasks of high-wage jobs, directly substitute for the routine tasks found in many traditional middle-wage jobs, and may have little direct impact on non-routine manual tasks in relatively low-wage jobs can help explain the observed polarization of the U.S. labor market.
Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation: employees are "rational cheaters," who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs. We investigate the "rational cheater model" by observing how experimentally induced variation in monitoring of telephone call center employees influences opportunism. A significant fraction of employees behave as the "rational cheater model" predicts. A substantial proportion of employees, however, do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate. This heterogeneity is related to variation in employee assessments of their general treatment by the employer. (JEL D2, J2, L2, L8, M12)
The theories of supermodular optimization and games provide a framework for the analysis of systems marked by complementarity. We summarize the principal results of these theories and indicate their usefulness by applying them to study the shift to ‘modern manufacturing’. We also use them to analyze the characteristic features of the Lincoln Electric Company's strategy and structure.
In this paper we analyze the behavioral consequences of control on motivation. Wenstudy a simple experimental principal-agent game, where the principal decides whethernhe controls the agent by implementing a minimum performance requirement before the agent chooses a productive activity. Our main finding is that a principal's decisionnto control has a negative impact on the agent's motivation. While there is substantial individual heterogeneity among agents, most agents reduce their performance as a response to the principals' controlling decision. The majority of the principals seem to anticipate the hidden costs of control and decide not to control. In several treatmentsnwe vary the enforceable level of control and show that control has a non-monotonic effect on the principal's payoff. In a variant of our main treatment principals can also set wages. In this gift-exchange game control partly crowds out agents' reciprocity. The economic importance and possible applications of our experimental results are further illustrated by a questionnaire study which reveals hidden costs of control in various real-life labor scenarios. We also explore possible reasons for the existence of hidden costs of control. Agents correctly believe that principals who control expect to get less than those who don't. When asked for their emotional perception of control, most agents who react negatively say that they perceive the controlling decision as a signal of distrust and a limitation of their choice autonomy.
Much of the theory in personnel economics relates to effects of monetary incentives on output, but the theory was untested because appropriate data were unavailable. A new data set for the Safelite Glass Corporation tests the predictions that average productivity will rise, the firm will attract a more able workforce, and variance in output across individuals at the firm will rise when it shifts to piece rates. In Safelite, productivity effects amount to a 44-percent increase in output per worker. This firm apparently had selected a suboptimal compensation system, as profits also increased with the change.
Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent total factor productivity (TFP) differences across firms and countries. This review paper discusses what has been learned empirically and theoretically from the WMS and other recent work on management practices. Our preliminary results suggest that about a quarter of cross-country and within-country TFP gaps can be accounted for by management practices. Management seems to matter both qualitatively and quantitatively for performance at the level of the firm and the nation. Competition, governance, human capital, and informational frictions help account for the variation in management. We make some suggestions for both policy and future research.
Schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life may help employees
manage the work-family interface. Existing data and research designs, however, have made
it difficult to conclusively identify the effects of these work resources. This analysis utilizes
a group-randomized trial in which some units in an information technology workplace were
randomly assigned to participate in an initiative, called STAR, that targeted work practices,
interactions, and expectations by (1) training supervisors on the value of demonstrating
support for employees’ personal lives and (2) prompting employees to reconsider when
and where they work. We find statistically significant, although modest, improvements in
employees’ work-family conflict and family time adequacy, and larger changes in schedule
control and supervisor support for family and personal life. We find no evidence that this
intervention increased work hours or perceived job demands, as might have happened
with increased permeability of work across time and space. Subgroup analyses suggest the
intervention brought greater benefits to employees more vulnerable to work-family conflict.
This study uses a rigorous design to investigate deliberate organizational changes and their
effects on work resources and the work-family interface, advancing our understanding of the
impact of social structures on individual lives.
In an effort to cut costs and improve worker morale, corporations are increasingly turning to telecommuting. Conflicting reports exist though on the effects that working outside the office has on productivity which directly affects a company's bottom line. This study explores these controversies using an experimental approach. Creative and dull individual tasks were used to mimic two extreme work climates. Results of this study indicate that the telecommuting environmental effects may have positive implications on productivity of creative tasks but negative implications on productivity of dull tasks.
Ctrip is a $437 million Chinese on-line travel services company with a scientific, data driven approach to management. The case explores Ctrip's founding and early growth, its expansion into multiple market segments including hotel reservations, air ticketing, leisure travel, and corporate travel, and the sources of its competitive advantage. The firm's culture, organization and call center operations are described in detail, as are its decision-making and business processes. At the end of the case, executives are considering whether Ctrip should actively pursue either the budget or luxury travel segments, which would mean shifting attention from the company's core customer base of Frequent Independent Travelers.Learning Objective: The case has three main purposes. First, it helps students understand some of the distinctive challenges of the Chinese marketplace and how those challenges can be overcome. Ctrip was founded in 1999 at a time when the Chinese travel industry was fragmented; the key players were either state-owned enterprises or small, local travel agencies. Ctrip grew quickly by consolidating the business, broadening geographical coverage, and offering superior service. Second, the case includes a detailed description of the company's scientific approach to management, which help students better understand its elements and key components: data-driven decision making, experimentation, process analysis, and a non-hierarchical, learning oriented culture. Third, the case presents students with a dilemma faced by many growing companies - deciding if and when to expand into new market segments that are likely to require different capabilities because they appeal to a different customer base (in this case, either budget or luxury travelers rather than Ctrip's traditional Frequent Independent Travelers).
This is a study of factors responsible for the wide cross-sectional differences in the past and current rates of use of hybrid seed corn in the United States. Logistic growth functions are fitted to the data by states and crop reporting districts, reducing differences among areas to differences in estimates of the three parameters of the logistic: origins, slopes, and ceilings. The lag in the development of adaptable hybrids for particular areas and the lag in the entry of seed producers into these areas (differences in origins) are explained on the basis of varying profitability of entry, "profitability" being a function of market density, and innovation and marketing cost. Differences in the long-run equilibrium use of hybrid corn (ceilings) and in the rates of approach to that equilibrium (slopes) are explained, at least in part, by differences in the profitability of the shift from open pollinated to hybrid varieties in different parts of the country. The results are summarized and the conclusion is drawn that the process of innovation, the process of adapting and distributing a particular invention to different markets and the rate at which it is accepted by entrepreneurs are amenable to economic analysis.
In recent studies of the structure of affect, positive and negative affect have consistently emerged as two dominant and relatively independent dimensions. A number of mood scales have been created to measure these factors; however, many existing measures are inadequate, showing low reliability or poor convergent or discriminant validity. To fill the need for reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect scales that are also brief and easy to administer, we developed two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The scales are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period. Normative data and factorial and external evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the scales are also presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Many critics of free-market liberalism argue that higher product-market competition and the "Anglo-Saxon" management practices it stimulates increases productivity only at the expense of employees' work-life balance (WLB). The empirical basis of these claims is unclear. To address this issue we use an innovative survey tool to collect the first international data on management practices and work-life balance practices, surveying 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. We find that WLB outcomes are significantly associated with better management, so that well run firms are both more productive and better for their employees. After controlling for management practices, however, we find no additional relationship between WLB and productivity. WLB practices are also not reduced by tougher competition, suggesting no deleterious effect of competition on employees' working environment. Finally, looking at multinationals we find that US subsidiaries in Europe adopt the superior management practices of their US parent firms but the local WLB practices of their European competitors.
A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity,
especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investigate this, we ran a management
field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on management practices to randomly chosen treatment
plants and compared their performance to a set of control plants. We find that adopting these management practices raised
productivity by 17% in the first year through improved quality and efficiency and reduced inventory, and within three years
led to the opening of more production plants. Why had the firms not adopted these profitable practices previously? Our results
suggest that informational barriers were the primary factor explaining this lack of adoption. Also, because reallocation across
firms appeared to be constrained by limits on managerial time, competition had not forced badly managed firms to exit. JEL Codes: L2, M2, O14, O32, O33.
This study documents the rapid growth in home-based wage and salary employment and the sharp decline in the home-based wage penalty in the United States between 1980 and 2000. These twin patterns, observed for both men and women in most occupation groups, suggest that employer costs of providing home-based work arrangements have decreased. Consistent with information technology (IT) advances being an important source of these falling costs, I find that occupation-gender cells that had larger increases in on-the-job IT use also experienced larger increases in the home-based employment share and larger declines in the home-based wage penalty.
In this paper we propose a variance estimator for the OLS estimator as well as for nonlinear estimators such as logit, probit and GMM. This variance estimator en- ables cluster-robust inference when there is two-way or multi-way clustering that is non-nested. The variance estimator extends the standard cluster-robust variance es- timator or sandwich estimator for one-way clustering (e.g. Liang and Zeger (1986), Arellano (1987)) and relies on similar relatively weak distributional assumptions. Our method is easily implemented in statistical packages, such as Stata and SAS, that already o�er cluster-robust standard errors when there is one-way clustering. The method is demonstrated by a Monte Carlo analysis for a two-way random ef- fects model; a Monte Carlo analysis of a placebo law that extends the state-year e�ects example of Bertrand et al. (2004) to two dimensions; and by application to studies in the empirical literature where two-way clustering is present.
This paper calculates indices of central bank autonomy (CBA) for 163 central banks as of end-2003, and comparable indices for a subgroup of 68 central banks as of the end of the 1980s. The results confirm strong improvements in both economic and political CBA over the past couple of decades, although more progress is needed to boost political autonomy of the central banks in emerging market and developing countries. Our analysis confirms that greater CBA has on average helped to maintain low inflation levels. The paper identifies four broad principles of CBA that have been shared by the majority of countries. Significant differences exist in the area of banking supervision where many central banks have retained a key role. Finally, we discuss the sequencing of reforms to separate the conduct of monetary and fiscal policies. IMF Staff Papers (2009) 56, 263–296. doi:10.1057/imfsp.2008.25; published online 23 September 2008
Three experiments examine what is widely reported to be one of the most common forms of interference in open-plan office environments—the effect of background noise. Experiment 1 investigates whether office noise (with or without speech) is disruptive to two office-related tasks: memory for prose and mental arithmetic. The results show that whereas office noise with speech disrupts performance on both tasks, office noise without speech disrupts performance on the mental arithmetic task only. Experiment 2 investigates the memory for prose task more closely by varying the duration and the meaning of the background noise. Experiment 3 examines whether the meaning of speech is important to the disruption of a mental arithmetic task. The results show that both speech and office noise can disrupt performance on memory for prose and mental arithmetic tasks, and the effect is independent of the meaning of the irrelevant speech. These results are presented and interpreted in light of current research and theories regarding the effect of background noise.
[Excerpt] American society has changed dramatically over the past half century. Women have entered the labor force in growing numbers and families have increasingly relied on more than one earner to make ends meet. And yet, children still need to be taken to the doctor and elderly parents still need care. Moreover, more adults older than 25 are attending school. Because these changes have caused many workers to face conflicts between their work and their personal lives, they also inspire a need and desire for more flexibility in the workplace. Flexible workplace arrangements can be in terms of when one works, where one works, or how much one works (including time off after childbirth or other life events). They include a variety of arrangements such as job sharing, phased retirement of older workers, and telecommuting, that allow workers to continue making productive contributions to the workforce while also attending to family and other responsibilities. This report presents an economic perspective on flexible workplace policies and practices. The first section reports some of the changes in the U.S. workforce that have increased the need for flexibility in the workplace. • Women comprise nearly one-half of the labor force; in nearly one-half of households all adults are working. • In 2008, approximately 43.5 million Americans served as unpaid caregivers to a family member over the age of 50. Nearly one-fifth of employed people were caregivers who provided care to a person over age 50. • The increasing demand for analytical and interactive skills—those largely obtained through post-secondary education—means it is all the more important and common for individuals to pursue additional education while also working. The second section examines the current state of flexible work arrangements and reports that many employers have adapted to the changing realities of American workers. • Overall, over one-half of employers report allowing at least some workers to periodically change their starting and quitting times. However, less than one-third of full-time workers report having flexible work hours, and only 39 percent of part-time workers do. This discrepancy between the employer and employee reports may be due to differences in data collection or because more employers would be willing to accommodate the needs of individual workers but these workers are not aware of it. • Less-skilled workers have less workplace flexibility in terms of the scheduling of when they work than do more highly-skilled workers. • Flexibility in where to work is less common: only about 15 percent of workers report working from home at least once per week. • Finally, most employers offer at least some workers the ability to return to work gradually after a major life event such as the birth or adoption of a child, although job sharing appears less widespread. The report concludes with a discussion of the economic benefits of workplace flexibility arrangements. • Almost one-third of firms cite costs or limited funds as obstacles to implementing workplace flexibility arrangements. However, the benefits of adopting such management practices can outweigh the costs by reducing absenteeism, lowering turnover, improving the health of workers, and increasing productivity. • The costs and benefits of adopting flexible arrangements differ across industries and employers of different sizes. • Because many employers may not have accurate information about the costs and benefits of workplace flexibility practices and because some of the benefits may extend beyond the individual employer and its workers, wider adoption of such policies and practices may well have benefits to more firms and workers, and for the U.S. economy as a whole. • A factor hindering a deeper understanding of the benefits and costs of flexibility is a lack of data on the prevalence of workplace flexibility arrangements, and more research is needed on the mechanisms through which flexibility influences workers’ job satisfaction and firm profits to help policy makers and managers alike.
We present evidence on whether workers have social preferences by comparing workers' productivity under relative incentives,
where individual effort imposes a negative externality on others, with their productivity under piece rates, where it does
not. We find that the productivity of the average worker is at least 50 percent higher under piece rates than under relative
incentives. We show that this is due to workers partially internalizing the negative externality their effort imposes on others
under relative incentives, especially when working alongside their friends. Under piece rates, the relationship among workers
does not affect productivity. Further analysis reveals that workers internalize the externality only when they can monitor
others and be monitored. This rules out pure altruism as the underlying motive of workers' behavior.
We study subjects who were asked to fill letters into envelopes with a remuneration independent of output. In the "pair" treatment, two subjects worked at the same time in the same room, and peer effects were possible. In the "single" treatment, subjects worked alone, and peer effects were ruled out. We find evidence of peer effects in the pair treatment because the standard deviations of output are smaller within pairs than between pairs. Moreover, average output is higher in the pair treatment: thus, peer effects raise productivity. Finally, low-productivity workers are the most sensitive to the behavior of peers.
We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium-sized firms in the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin's Q, and survival rates. Management practices also display significant cross-country differences, with U.S. firms on average better managed than European firms, and significant within-country differences, with a long tail of extremely badly managed firms. We find that poor management practices are more prevalent when product market competition is weak and/or when family-owned firms pass management control down to the eldest sons (primogeniture). (c) 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..
We document several empirical regularities regarding the evolution of urban structure in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas over the period 1980-90. These regularities relate to changes in resident population, employment, occupations, as well as the number and size of establishments in different sections of the metropolitan area. We then propose a theory of urban structure that emphasizes the location and internal structure decisions of firms. In particular, firms can decide to locate their headquarters and operation plants in different regions of the city. Given that cities experienced positive population growth throughout the 1980s, we show that firm fragmentation produces the diverse set of facts documented in the article. Copyright © (2009) by the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
This paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the Job Corps program, one of the largest federally funded job training
programs in the U.S. Even with the aid of a randomized experiment, the impact of a training program on wages is difficult
to study because of sample selection, a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research. Wage rates are only observed
for those who are employed, and employment status itself may be affected by the training program. This paper develops an intuitive
trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection. In contrast to existing methods,
the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest. Identification results,
estimators, and their asymptotic distribution are presented. The bounds suggest that the program raised wages, consistent
with the notion that the Job Corps raises earnings by increasing human capital, rather than solely through encouraging work.
The estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection/attrition.
We investigate how and why the productivity of a worker varies as a function of the productivity of her co-workers in a group production process. In theory, the introduction of a high productivity worker could lower the effort of incumbent workers because of free riding; or it could increase the effort of incumbent workers because of peer effects induced by social norms, social pressure, or learning. Using scanner level data, we measure high frequency, worker-level productivity of checkers for a large grocery chain. Because of the firm‘s scheduling policy, the timing of within-day changes in personnel is unsystematic, a feature for which we find consistent support in the data. We find strong evidence of positive productivity spillovers from the introduction of highly productive personnel into a shift. A 10% increase in average co-worker permanent productivity is associated with 1.7% increase in a worker’s effort. Most of this peer effect arises from low productivity workers benefiting from the presence of high productivity workers. Therefore, the optimal mix of workers in a given shift is the one that maximizes skill diversity. In order to explain the mechanism that generates the peer effect, we examine whether effort depends on workers’ ability to monitor one another due to their spatial arrangement, and whether effort is affected by the time workers have previously spent working together. We find that a given worker’s effort is positively related to the presence and speed of workers who face him, but not the presence and speed of workers whom he faces (and do not face him). In addition, workers respond more to the presence of co-workers with whom they frequently overlap. These patterns indicate that these individuals are motivated by social pressure and mutual monitoring, and suggest that social preferences can play an important role in inducing effort, even when economic incentives are limited.
This study uses detailed time diaries from household surveys for 1975 and 1981 to examine how changes in the use of time on the job affect earnings. Among nonunion workers, the marginal minute of break time apparently increases earnings, but not as much as does the marginal minute of work time. Among union workers, additional time in unscheduled breaks appears to be associated with significantly higher earnings, though other break time is not. The author concludes that further growth in on-the-job leisure would reduce productivity, that monitoring workers would yield returns to the firm, but that entirely eliminating breaks would be counterproductive. (Abstract courtesy JSTOR.)
Standard real business cycle models must rely on total factor productivity (TFP) shocks to explain the observed comovement of consumption, investment, and hours worked. This paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption can generate comovement in the absence of TFP shocks. Intertemporal substitution of goods and leisure induces comovement over the business cycle through heterogeneity in the consumption behavior of employed and unemployed workers. This result owes to two model features introduced to capture important characteristics of U.S. labor market data. First, individual consumption is affected by the number of hours worked: Employed agents consume more on average than the unemployed do. Second, changes in the employment rate, a central factor explaining variation in total hours, affect aggregate consumption. Demand shocks--such as shifts in the marginal efficiency of investment, as well as government spending shocks and news shocks--are shown to generate economic fluctuations consistent with observed business cycles.
Much of the theory in personnel economics relates to effects of monetary incentives on output, but the theory was untested because appropriate data were unavailable. A new data set for the Safelite Glass Corporation tests the predictions that average productivity will rise, the firm will attract a more able workforce, and variance in output across individuals at the firm will rise when it shifts to piece rates. In Safelite, productivity effects amount to a 44-percent increase in output per worker. This firm apparently had selected a suboptimal compensation system, as profits also increased with the change.
Do "Anglo-Saxon" management practices generate higher productivity only at the expense of lousywork-life balance (WLB) for workers? Many critics of "neo-libéralisme sauvage" have argued thatincreased competition from globalisation is damaging employees' quality of life. Others have arguedthe opposite that improving work-life balance is actually a competitive tool that companies can useto raise productivity. We try to shed some empirical light on these issues using an innovative surveytool to collect new data on management and work-life balance practices from 732 medium sizedmanufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. First, we show that our measure ofwork-life balance is a useful summary of a range of policies in the firm - family-friendly policies,flexible working, shorter hours, more holidays, subsidised childcare, etc. We show that this worklifebalance measure is significantly associated with better management. Firms in environments thatare more competitive and/or who are more productive, however, do not have significantly worsework-life balance for their workers. These findings are inconsistent with the view that competition,globalisation and "Anglo-Saxon" management practices are intrinsically bad for the work-lifebalance of workers. On the other hand, neither are these findings supportive of the optimistic "winwin"view that work-life balance improves productivity in its own right. Rather we find support for a"hybrid" theory that work-life balance is a choice for managers that is compatible with low or highproductivity.
We investigate the nature of selection and productivity growth in industries where we observe producer-level quantities and prices separately. We show there are important differences between revenue and physical productivity. Because physical productivity is inversely correlated with price while revenue productivity is positively correlated with price, previous work linking (revenue- based) productivity to survival confounded the separate and opposing effects of technical efficiency and demand on survival, understating the true impacts of both. Further, we find that young producers charge lower prices than incumbents. Thus the literature understates new producers' productivity advantages and entry's contribution to aggregate productivity growth. (JEL D24, L11, L25)
Telecommunications 2004: Strategy, HR Practices and PerformanceThe Impact of Urban Spatial Structure on Travel Demand in the United States
- Iwan Barankay
- Batt
- Alex Rosemary
- Harvey Colvin
- Jeff Keefe Katz
Barankay, Iwan, " Rank Incentives: Evidence from a Randomized Workplace Experiment ", Working paper, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2012. Batt, Rosemary, Alex Colvin, Harvey Katz, and Jeff Keefe, " Telecommunications 2004: Strategy, HR Practices and Performance ", Center for Advanced Human Resources Studies, Cornell University, Working Paper Series, Working paper 04 –18, 2004. Bento, Antonio, Maureen Cropper, Ahmed Mobarak, and Katja Vinha, "The Impact of Urban Spatial Structure on Travel Demand in the United States," Review of Economics and Statistics, 87 (2005), 466-478.