About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to "shirking from home." We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000- employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly...

Workplace misbehaviors are often governed by explicit monitoring and strict punishment. Such enforcement activities can serve to lessen worker productivity and harm worker morale. We take a different approach to curbing worker misbehavior--bonuses. Examining more than 6500 donor phone calls...

Numerous government policies have attempted to keep workers out of the workplace, on the assumption that this will lower transmission of COVID-19. We test that assumption, measuring the effect of aggregate workplace absence on US COVID deaths at the county level through August. Instrumenting...

Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The...

Racial social isolation within and across workplaces may reduce firm productivity. We provide descriptive evidence that African-Americans feel socially isolated from Whites. To test whether isolation affects productivity, we estimate models of Total Factor Productivity for manufacturing firms...

We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employee's digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Using de- identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users, we find, compared to...

Using data from the US Postal Service and Zillow, we quantify the effect of Covid-19 on migration patterns and real estate markets within and across US cities. We find two key results. First, within large US cities, households, businesses, and real estate demand have moved from dense central...

We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed jobseekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the jobseekers made. Heterogeneity in non-wage job values or amenities among jobseekers and jobs is a...