Episode 103: Emma Harrington on the Benefits and Costs of Working Next to Your Colleagues

Emma Harrington is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia

The paper discussed in this episode is this one.

This paper studies who benefits and who suffers from working next to their colleagues, in the context of software engineers. Junior engineers benefit from receiving more feedback from their more experienced colleagues, when the team is located in a single building, as opposed to dispersed over many buildings. On the other hand, this comes at the cost of senior engineers writing less programmes. During the pandemic, everybody moved to working from home, so the difference between single-building and multi-building teams disappeared.

Other articles discussed in this episode are:

Allen, T. J. (1977). Managing the Flow of Technology: Technology Transfer and the Dissemination of Technological Information Within the R&D Organization. MIT Press.

Battiston et al. (2021): Battiston, D., Blanes i Vidal, J., & Kirchmaier, T. (2021). Face-to-face communication in organizations. Review of Economic Studies, 88(2), 574–609. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaa060

Bloom et al. (2015): Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., & Ying, Z. J. (2015). Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165–218. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju032

Catalini (2018): Catalini, C. (2018). Microgeography and the direction of inventive activity. Management Science, 64(9), 4348–4364. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2798

Kraut et al. (1988): Kraut, R. E., Egido, C., & Galegher, J. (1988). Patterns of contact and communication in scientific research collaboration. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Portland, Oregon. ACM Press, pp. 1–12.