Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment: A Data Analysis on the Impact of Te

Introduction to Telecommuting

For this assessment, you are asked to investigate a question central to the study of contemporary management: Whether firms should let their employees telecommute, namely do some or all of their work from home. The data and the study are based on Nicholas Bloom & James Liang & John Roberts & Zhichun Jenny Ying, 2015. "Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 130(1), pages 165-218. You are asked to answer the following research question: How does working from home affect the job and life satisfaction of employees?

Background: The study focuses on the effect of allowing workers who previously worked at the office to telecommute for four days a week. The company wanted to know whether their employees would work less hard at home or whether not having to commute and working in a more personal space would improve their concentration and effort levels. The company is a large travel agency and employees telecommuting were either taking/making bookings for trips/hotels or they were correcting orders.

Data: You will analyse the dataset “satisfaction.dta”. This data set contains measures of satisfaction and attitudes from weekly surveys of employees undertaken before and during the experiment. The data also includes background information on employees, such as gender, age, whether they have children, length of commute, etc.; and a ‘treatment’ variable, which indicates whether an employee was working from home in the week in which the data were recorded. You are asked to analyse only one of the three measurements of satisfaction (satisfaction, general, or life). Please note that this is the same data set and the research question that we worked on throughout the term in the seminars. 

You are asked to submit a report of 2,500 words based on the analysis of the satisfaction data set available in QMPLUS.

i) Telecommuting practice (10 points - recommended length 300-400 words). Write an introduction that summarizes the telecommuting practice and its implications for management. The discussion of the article by Bloom et al. (2015) (experimental set-up, business context, and key findings) is mandatory but you can extend this discussion with references to other studies in the literature (optional).

(ii) Descriptive statistics and graphical analysis of the variables in the data and the associations between them (30 points - recommend length 400-600):

Your analysis should cover both explanatory variables and the dependent variable. The assessment will consider the correctness of the material presented in tables and graphs, the formatting of the tables and the graphs, and the interpretation and the discussion of the statistical results.

(iv) Your main hypotheses and output tests of these hypotheses using t-tests of comparing means (25 points - recommended length 600-700 words): You must specify your statistical hypothesis / hypotheses and test them correctly using t-test. The statistical hypotheses must aim to answer your research question. The assessment will consider the correctness of the hypotheses, the specification of the t-test and its implementation in Stata, the formatting of the statistical table(s) provided, and the interpretation and the discussion of the results.

(v) Regression analysis testing the same hypotheses (25 points - recommended length 600-700 words): You must introduce regression models testing the same hypotheses, explaining the models. You must present the regression model results in a properly formatted table. The assessment will consider the correctness of the regression analyses, the formatting of the statistical tables and graphs provided, and the interpretation and the discussion of the results.

(vi) Your recommendations and conclusions from this analysis (10 points - recommended length 300-400 words): You must summarize the key findings from your analysis and interpret their implications for the telecommuting practice. 

The group project report length is 2500 words, excluding the tables, figures, bibliography, and appendices (in case you want to provide additional details on certain aspects).