Works
- The organization of firms across countries, Quarterly Journal of Economics 127(4), 1663 to 1705, 2012
- The distinct effects of information technology and communication technology on firm organization, Management Science 60(12), 2859 to 2885, 2014
- Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment, Quarterly Journal of Economics 130(1), 165 to 218, 2015
- Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance, Nature 630(8018), 920 to 925, 2024
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Management practices and the economics of working from home
Ideas
Working from home in randomized trials. With colleagues, Bloom found in a randomized experiment at Ctrip that working from home raised call center performance 13 percent and halved attrition, while promotion conditional on performance fell. Caveat: One firm, routine work.
Hybrid work and retention. With Han and Liang, found in a randomized trial that two days a week at home cut quits by a third with no detectable effect on performance or promotion. Caveat: One firm; hybrid rather than fully remote.
Trust and decentralization. With Sadun and Van Reenen, Bloom found in almost 4,000 firms that firms headquartered in high-trust regions are more likely to decentralize. Caveat: Survey measures of decentralization.
Information technology against communication technology. With Garicano, Sadun, and Van Reenen, found in American and European manufacturing firms that information technologies (ERP for plant managers, CAD/CAM for production workers) go with more autonomy and a wider span of control, and communication technologies such as data intranets with less autonomy for workers and plant managers. Caveat: Manufacturing firms only; only the abstract was read.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.