• March 2023
• Case

In 2023, the term metaverse — a combination of the words “meta” and “universe” — had become a catch-all for a diverse set of expectations about online virtual worlds, virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), augmented reality (AR), and the future of the internet, which each meant different things to different people. What did seem certain was that a piece of the future was up for grabs. In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company was “all in on the metaverse,” and changed its name to Meta to position itself for the coming shift. Meta’s big bet was based on one vision of a still-evolving future. Executives at other companies like Epic Games, Microsoft, Nvidia, Electronic Arts, and Roblox had vastly different views of whether, how, and when the metaverse would take shape. In the midst of the debate and uncertainty, executives and entrepreneurs had to deal with several critical questions as they strove to form their own vision and strategy for the metaverse. First, was the metaverse going to emerge in the next few years or much further down the road (if at all)? Second, what would be the main use cases of the metaverse, and which one(s) would come first? Some expected consumer use cases like gaming to lead the way, while others expected enterprise use cases to really demonstrate the value. Third, and perhaps most critically, would the metaverse be an open, interoperable, interconnected virtual world, much like the Internet in 2023? Or would it play out like most social networks, as large but separate and closed walled gardens?

• 2023
• Working Paper

The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure and characterize this shift, we examine more than 250 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. Our measurements rely on a state-of-the-art language-processing framework that we fit, test, and refine using 30,000 human classifications. We achieve 99% accuracy in flagging job postings that advertise hybrid or fully remote work, greatly outperforming dictionary methods and also outperforming other machine-learning methods. From 2019 to early 2023, the share of postings that say new employees can work remotely one or more days per week rose more than three-fold in the U.S. and by a factor of five or more in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. These developments are highly non-uniform across and within cities, industries, occupations, and companies. Even when zooming in on employers in the same industry competing for talent in the same occupations, we find large differences in the share of job postings that explicitly offer remote work.

• February 2023
• Case

In 2020, Alejandro Simón, CEO of Sancor Seguros Group, a nearly 75-year-old cooperative that had become Argentina’s insurance leader, had to decide about the Group’s digital transformation strategy. The Group’s values and history needed to be considered during the analysis, especially regarding its relationship with individual agents selling Sancor Seguros Group’s products, who drove much of the Group’s revenues. Sancor Seguros Group had always taken into consideration agents’ input when making important decisions, which extended to the Group’s recent efforts on its digital transformation. Yet, not all of them had adapted to new technologies. However, the use of digital channels to sell goods and services accelerated after almost two months of a mandatory quarantine that restricted out-of-home activities to buying essentials such as food and medicines. Would the momentum gained by these digital channels persist, serving as the platform for agents to catch up with the industry’s newest global trends? Accordingly, how could Sancor Seguros Group help agents capture the value created by new technologies? How should the Group approach its presence on less personalized channels, like the ones offered by brokers or digital channels? The Group could also concentrate its efforts on long-term actions and focus on revamping its product offering.