Does working from home work? A natural wxperiment from lockdowns

Lucas Shen

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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 timestamped 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: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-hrm and nep-lma
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/115545/1/MPRA_paper_115446.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:115446

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