Tulsa Remote: Moving Talent to Middle America

Prithwiraj  Choudhury; Emma  Salomon

Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2020

Tulsa Remote: Moving Talent to Middle America

by Prithwiraj Choudhury and Emma Salomon

Abstract

Tulsa Remote sought to attract a diverse group of remote workers to the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma—and was willing to put its money where its mouth was, offering $10,000 and a range of wraparound services for its program participants. After a successful pilot year, which saw the program select 100 participants out of more than 10,000 applicants, Tulsa Remote was excited to begin its second round of applications. However, the program faced an ongoing challenge attracting Black men to participate in the program. The team wondered what they could do to make their program—and their community—feel more welcoming. Meanwhile, as the second group of remote workers began making plans to move to Tulsa, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. How would the program deal with the effects of the pandemic, both on the local economy and on remote work in general?

Keywords: remote work; relocation; Employment; Online Technology; Geographic Location; Programs; Employees; Diversity; Health Pandemics; Oklahoma; Tulsa;

Language: English

Format: Print

22 pages

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Citation:

Choudhury, Prithwiraj, and Emma Salomon. "Tulsa Remote: Moving Talent to Middle America." Harvard Business School Case 621-048, September 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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