[civilized]

They use the people who were already working at home before the pandemic as a control group. They experienced the same pandemic changes as everyone else, except they were already working from home. So theoretically, taking the difference between the newly WFH group and the already WFH group "cancels out" pandemic-related effects and isolates the impact of moving to WFH.

In simplistic terms, Group A experienced "pandemic + effect from changing to WFH" while Group B experienced only "pandemic". Therefore, B-A = "effect from changing to WFH" alone.

It's a nice idea but I'm not sure it's entirely convincing. It seems like you'd have to assume a couple things: (1) the pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so that taking the difference between the two groups cancels out the pandemic effect; (2) new WFHers are interchangeable with veteran WFHers.

As a veteran WFHer, Assumption 2 seems especially suspect to me. People who self-selected into WFH and have been doing it for a while are going to be a very different group than the general population forced into it by a pandemic.

That said, I am a fan of econometrists and the crazy stunts they do with data to obtain so-called "natural experiments". So I'm open to changing my mind here. These kinds of papers are rarely convincing but never boring. Perhaps they managed to prove the somewhat uninteresting proposition that people thrust into WFH by a pandemic aren't very good at it.

[null_shift]

“(1) the pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so that taking the difference between the two groups cancels out the pandemic effect“

i think this is a significantly flawed assumption. in my experience, the people that had been working from home previously are much better equipped to deal with the pandemic (e.g. likely have a home office set up vs. working from makeshift workspace like a kitchen table).

[Natsu]

Yeah, not all businesses were well-prepared for a sudden WFH transition like this. At my employer, we were already doing limited WFH (one day a week) and productivity & satisfaction increased broadly for full WFH, but I know that doesn't generalize and some particular people had individual issues (e.g. it's hard to work on stuff that requires focus while small children want your attention).

[Bilal_io]

> They experienced the same pandemic changes as everyone else

It takes a while to adjust to the changes.