Publications

SSRN

28 Aug 2018
Working Paper Summaries

Homesick or Home Run? Distance from Hometown and Employee Performance: A Natural Experiment from India

Keywords: by Prithwiraj Choudhury and Ohchan Kwon

July–August 2013
Article

Relaxing the Taboo on Telling Our Own Stories: Upholding Professional Distance and Personal Involvement

By: Michel Anteby

Scholars studying organizations are typically discouraged from telling, in print, their own stories. The expression "telling our own stories" is used as a proxy for field research projects that, in their written form, explicitly rely on a scholar's personal involvement... View Details

Keywords: Fieldwork; Research Practiced; Distance; Involvement; Taboo; Practice; Ethics; Education Industry

March 2022 (Revised March 2024)
Case

Hometown Foods: Changing Price amid Inflation

By: Julian De Freitas, Jeremy Yang and Das Narayandas

During the early part of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Hometown Foods, a large seller of flour-based products, thrived as consumers hoarded baked goods and took up baking to pass the time and find comfort. Then, amid growing shortages in commodities, a vaccine arrived,... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Consumer Behavior; Supply Chain; Inflation and Deflation; Spending; Price Bubble; Price; Volatility; Food and Beverage Industry

Educators

Purchase

2021
Working Paper

The Effects of Temporal Distance on Intra-Firm Communication: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time

By: Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Pan Fang

Cross-border communication costs have plummeted and enabled the global distribution of work, but frictions attributable to distance persist. We estimate the causal effects of temporal distance, i.e., time zone separation between employees, on intra-firm communication,... View Details

Keywords: Communication Patterns; Time Zones; Geographic Frictions; Knowledge Workers; Multinational Companies; Communication; Multinational Firms and Management; Geographic Location

SSRN

Are you suddenly working from home? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of View Details

September 2012
Article

Vicarious Dishonesty: When Psychological Closeness Creates Distance from One's Moral Compass

By: F. Gino and A. Galinsky

In four studies employing multiple manipulations of psychological closeness, we found that feeling connected to another individual who engages in selfish or dishonest behavior leads people to vicariously justify the actions of this individual and to behave more... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Relationships; Ethics; Research

16 Dec 2002
Lessons from the Classroom

Marrying Distance and Classroom Education

adult learning workshop was looking at the strengths and weaknesses of face-to-face education versus online distance learning. But in fact, these two types of education can be quite complementary. Should executives interested in corporate... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

04 May 2017
News

Going the Distance

12, bought his first sailboat with money saved from collecting and recycling his neighbors’ newspapers. Although he dreamed of being a marine biologist, Frey’s academic passion was engineering, which sprang View Details

Keywords: Jill Radsken

23 Feb 2023
News

In My Humble Opinion: Hometown Reboot

part of that evolution—as the cofounder of a professional services firm, an investor, a developer, and a corporate board member. “The challenge and the opportunity is to work to ensure all Pittsburghers benefit from this transition,” he... View Details

Keywords: April White

24 May 2018
Research & Ideas

Distance Still Matters in Business, Despite the Internet

distance in some ways, it has grown it in others. As the authors observe, “For example, while information technology may be an effective means of coordinating ongoing projects and collaborations, it may be less effective as a means of... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Transportation; Telecommunications; Shipping; Publishing; Technology

17 Jan 2020
Blog Post

Going the Distance for Investment Excellence

trove,” said Cameron. “I was getting coursework in finance, macroeconomics, and policy, and, while there, I got a sense that I was leaning toward bonds. That’s what led to my first position in fixed income at Goldman Sachs.” HBS or Bust After graduating View Details

04 Apr 2022
News

Cost of Distancing May Outweigh Benefits for Healthy Adults

Article

Distance and Political Boundaries: Estimating Border Effects under Inequality Constraints

By: Fernando Borraz, Alberto Cavallo, Roberto Rigobon and Leandro Zipitria

The border effects literature finds that political boundaries have a large impact on relative prices across locations. In this paper we show that the standard empirical specification suffers from selection bias, and propose a new methodology based on binned-quantile... View Details

Keywords: Border Effects; Prices

2021
Working Paper

Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from U.S. States

By: Clare Halloran, Rebecca Jack, James C. Okun and Emily Oster

We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or distance learning) on test scores. We combine Spring 2021 state standardized test score data with comprehensive data on schooling in the 2020-21 school year across 12 states. We find... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; In-person Schooling; Distance Learning; Outcomes Measurement; Health Pandemics; Education; Performance Evaluation

11 Mar 2013
Research & Ideas

Marissa Mayer Should Bridge Distance Gap with Remote Workers

Marissa Mayer's decision to ask Yahoo! employees to work from offices rather than at home has at least two potentially negative consequences, one for her and one for her employees. But she can mitigate both by linking personal and... View Details

Keywords: by Lakshmi Ramarajan; Publishing; Web Services

2020
Working Paper

Working (From Home) During a Crisis: Online Social Contributions by Workers During the Coronavirus Shock

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Wesley W. Koo and Xina Li

Prior research has documented that during mortality-related crises workers face psychic costs and are motivated to make social contributions. In addition, management practices that encourage workers to make social contributions during a crisis create value for firms.... View Details

Keywords: Crisis; Social Contributions; Work From Home (WFH); Cannot Work From Home (CWFH); Social Distancing; Online Communities; Coronavirus; COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Employees; Working Conditions; Internet and the Web; Crisis Management

SSRN

February 2022
Article

How Global Leaders Gain Power Through Downward Deference and Reduction of Social Distance

By: Tsedal Neeley and Sebastian Reiche

We theorize about how people with positional power enact downward deference—a practice of lowering oneself to be equal to that of lower power workers—based on a study of 115 top global leaders at a large U.S. company. These leaders were charged with advancing... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Leadership Style; Global Range; Relationships; Rank and Position; Power and Influence; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues

Purchase

2021
Article

Masked and Distanced: A Qualitative Study of How Personal Protective Equipment and Distancing Affect Teamwork in Emergency Care

By: Tuna Cem Hayirli, Nicholas Stark, Aditi Bhanja, James Hardy, Christopher Peabody and Michaela J. Kerrissey

Background: Newly intensified use of personal protective equipment (PPE) in emergency departments presents teamwork challenges affecting the quality and safety of care at the frontlines.
Objective: We conducted a qualitative study to categorize and... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Teamwork; Emergency Service; Hospital; Quality Of Health Care; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Quality; Groups and Teams; Communication