The Power of Proximity to Coworkers

Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais

No 31880, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: How does proximity to coworkers affect training and productivity? We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm from 2019 to 2024. We leverage two shocks to colocation: (i) the office closures in 2020 and (ii) the subsequent return-to-office mandates. In both cases, co-located teams experienced bigger changes in proximity than distributed ones, facilitating difference-in-differences designs. We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues. In national US data, we find suggestive evidence that the rise of remote work has had scarring effects on young college graduates: in remotable jobs, their unemployment rate has remained elevated relative to older graduates’, a pattern not seen in non-remotable jobs.

JEL-codes: J16 J24 M15 M53 M54 O33 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lma
Note: LS PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31880.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:31880

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31880

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().