Bloom, Nicholas , James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying. 2015. "Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment," Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 130(1), pages 165-218.
An excellent example of using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to study the effects of a personnel policy change in a firm. Workers at CTrip, a 16,000- employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency, where randomly assigned to working from home versus in the office. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell. Importantly, if the authors had not collected performance data on both their treatment and control groups before and afterthe treatment began, they would have erroneously concluded that working from home reduced productivity.
Battiston, Diego, Jordi Blanes i Vidal, and Thomas Kirchmaier, Thomas (2017) Is distance dead? Face-to-face communication and productivity in teams. CEP Discussion Papers, number 1473.
The Birmingham police department’s call response center eliminated face-to-face communication between handlers and dispatchers. In contrast to the results from Bloom et al.’s (2015) CTrip study, Battiston et al. found that eliminating face-to-face interaction between workers substantially reduced productivity. The effect is stronger for urgent and complex tasks, and in high pressure conditions.