Does working from home work? A natural experiment from lockdowns

Lucas Shen

European Economic Review, 2023, vol. 151, issue C

Abstract: Using tracked changes from a large open-source software platform, this paper studies how working from home affected the output of individuals working in tech. The basis of the natural experiment comes from idiosyncratic and state-imposed workplace closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. I find a negative but almost-negligible change in individual-level output of 0.5 percent (standard error of 0.091 percent). Overall, and based on descriptive analyses of the time-stamped data, tracked changes in software development cadences approximate regular work activity and provide a useful avenue for future studies of work.

Keywords: Real-time data; Work from home; GitHub; Labor economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 J01 J24 M54 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292122002033
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:151:y:2023:i:c:s0014292122002033

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2022.104323

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().