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  • April 2021
  • Article
  • Strategic Management Journal

Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographical Flexibility

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson
  • Format:Print
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Abstract

An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work-from-anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work-from-home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work-from-anywhere (WFA) programs offer both temporal and geographic flexibility. WFA should be viewed as a nonpecuniary benefit likely to be preferred by workers who would derive greater utility by moving from their current geographic location to their preferred location. We study the effects of WFA on productivity at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and exploit a natural experiment in which the implementation of WFA was driven by negotiations between managers and the patent examiners’ union, leading to exogeneity in the timing of individual examiners’ transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere program. This transition resulted in a 4.4 percent increase in output without affecting the incidence of rework. We also report results related to a plausible mechanism: an increase in observable effort as the worker transitions from a WFH to a WFA program. We employ illustrative field interviews, micro-data on locations, and machine learning analysis to shed further light on geographic flexibility, and summarize worker, firm, and economy-wide implications of provisioning WFA.

Keywords

Geographic Flexibility; Work-from-anywhere; Remote Work; Telecommuting; Geographic Mobility; USPTO; Employees; Geographic Location; Performance Productivity

Citation

Choudhury, Prithwiraj, Cirrus Foroughi, and Barbara Larson. "Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographical Flexibility." Strategic Management Journal 42, no. 4 (April 2021): 655–683.
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About The Author

Prithwiraj Choudhury

Technology and Operations Management
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More from the Authors
  • Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Kyle Schirmann
  • Unilever: Remote Work in Manufacturing By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Susie L. Ma
  • The Future of Start-Up Chile By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ruth Costas and Pedro Levindo
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