Abstract:

We study the role of managers in shaping remote work, a key organizational choice for many jobs. 

We use unique administrative data from the largest public agency in Italy, the Italian Social Security (INPS), combining human resources records, daily worker-level data on remote work and absences, and monthly office-level productivity measures. The richness of our data allows us to investigate how managers affect not only how much remote work employees use, but also how it is organized, and whether these practices affect productivity. 

Exploiting frequent, quasi-exogenous manager mobility across offices, we show that managers explain meaningful variation in all dimensions of remote-work practice. We then use manager transitions in a stacked event-study design to study how changes in managerial remote-work style affect realized practices and productivity. Transitions to managers who allow more remote work and implement more uniform allocations of remote work across workers increase productivity, whereas transitions to managers who induce more rigid weekday schedules reduce it. The findings show that the organization of remote work matters, and that middle managers are central to how key workplace policies are implemented.

Joint Applied Micro / Development Labor Political Economy Seminar

for information giovanna.tramontano@unibocconi.it.