Working (From Home) During a Crisis: Online Social Contributions by Workers During the Coronavirus Shock

Prithwiraj  Choudhury; Wesley W. Koo; Xina  Li

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

Working (From Home) During a Crisis: Online Social Contributions by Workers During the Coronavirus Shock

by Prithwiraj Choudhury, Wesley W. Koo and Xina Li

Abstract

Prior research has documented that during mortality-related crises workers face psychic costs and are motivated to make social contributions. In addition, management practices that encourage workers to make social contributions during a crisis create value for firms. However, the coronavirus crisis of 2020 is unprecedented given conditions of social distancing. It raises the question of whether workers who continued to work (albeit from home) during this crisis were constrained in their ability to make social contributions and exhibited disproportionately greater psychic costs compared to workers who could not work from home. We exploit this shock to estimate differences in content contributions to an online community by workers who work from home (WFH) relative to workers who cannot work from home (CWFH). Online content contributions are especially pertinent in our context because social distancing constrained traditional forms of social contributions such as physical volunteering. Using data from a popular question-and-answer platform, we estimate a difference-in-differences specification and report nuanced results: while WFH workers made 19% fewer online contributions on average and contribute less to topics such as ‘family’, they make 148% more contributions on topics related to ‘WFH best practices.’ Using natural language processing tools, we also find that WFH workers exhibited greater psychic costs than CWFH workers. We provide evidence for a plausible mechanism, i.e. time allocation, and show that WFH workers attempted to catch up on social contributions at the end of their workday, suggesting time constraints. Our research contributes to literatures on managing workers during a crisis, WFH and online communities, and have several immediate implications for managing WFH and CWFH workers during the coronavirus crisis.

Keywords: crisis; social contributions; work from home (WFH); cannot work from home (CWFH); social distancing; online communities; coronavirus; COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Employees; Working Conditions; Online Technology; Crisis Management;

Language: English

Format: Print

22 pages

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Citation:

Choudhury, Prithwiraj, Wesley W. Koo, and Xina Li. "Working (From Home) During a Crisis: Online Social Contributions by Workers During the Coronavirus Shock." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-096, March 2020. (Revised April 2020.)

We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 60 percent more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the number of foreign inventors from other nations that specialize in those same technologies. For the average country in our sample, this number corresponds to only 25 inventors and a standard deviation of 135. We deal with endogeneity concerns by using historical migration networks to instrument for stocks of migrant inventors. Our results generalize the evidence of previous studies that show how migrant inventors "import" knowledge from their home countries, which translates into higher patenting in the receiving countries. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of migrants facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.

On June 22, 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) that suspended new work visas, barring nearly 200,000 foreign workers and their dependents from entering the United States and preventing American companies from hiring skilled immigrants using H-1B or L1 visas. Exploiting this shock, and using event study methodology analyzing the cumulative average abnormal returns (CAARs) of Fortune 500 companies following this order, we find that the EO statistically and economically significantly caused negative CAARs of up to 0.45%, the equivalent of over 100 billion of US dollars of losses, based on the firms’ valuation before the event. Our results are particularly pronounced for firms that had maintained or increased their reliance on skilled immigrant workers over the prior years.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

The Effects of Temporal Distance on Intra-Firm Communication: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time

Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Fan Pang

Cross-border communication costs have plummeted and enabled the global distribution of work, but frictions attributable to distance persist. We estimate the causal effects of temporal distance stemming from time zone differences on intra-firm communication. We argue that temporal distance reduces synchronous and impromptu communication from first-best levels, and presents an especially costly friction for knowledge-intensive work. Exploiting detailed data from a large multinational firm and discrete changes in temporal distance due to shifts to and from Daylight Savings Time, we show that office pairs that lose one or two shared business hours due to DST reduce their total communication volumes by 9.2 percent on average from baseline levels, an effect driven by decreases in scheduled calls and meetings (-10.7 percent) and in instant-message chat volumes (-8.7 percent). When office pairs gain one or two shared business hours, volumes of unscheduled calls increase (+17.6 percent). Volumes of asynchronous communication (e-mail), in contrast, show no significant responses to changes in temporal distance. Examining heterogeneity by employee function, we find evidence that the shadow value of additional shared time is higher for knowledge-intensive (R&D and IT) employees than for production employees. Finally, using communication time stamps, we show that greater temporal distance leads to more work being shifted into leisure time; however, such adjustments do not fully offset lost communication during business hours. We discuss the implications of our findings for distributed work and for firms’ spatial organization.

Keywords: communication patterns; time zones; geographic frictions; knowledge workers; multinational companies;

Citation:

Chauvin, Jasmina, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Tommy Fan Pang. "The Effects of Temporal Distance on Intra-Firm Communication: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-052, September 2020. View Details

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