Assist. Prof. Alessandra Fenizia

Home Office Productivity

One project that Alessandra Fenizia and her collaborators are working on examines how working from home has changed productivity in the public sector. The COVID 19 pandemic pushed many organizations to adopt remote work, but we still know little about how this shift affects performance in settings where financial incentives are limited and job security is strong. Using detailed daily data from the Greater Manchester Police, the researchers study a system in which officers rotate between working at home and in the office on a fixed schedule, allowing us to compare productivity across locations. They find that working from home increases productivity by about 12%, mainly because employees experience fewer distractions. The improvement is even larger when supervisors assign tasks. They also carried out a randomized controlled trial that increased the share of time spent working from home from 70% to 95%, with the finding that no additional gains (or losses) from working almost entirely at home.

Ms. Fenizia is an applied microeconomist working primarily at the intersection of labor and public economics. Her research focuses on evaluating and improving the performance of public sector agencies and examining the impact of government policies on workers and firms by combining large administrative datasets with natural experiments and field experiments.

Alessandra Fenizia is an Assistant Professor at The George Washington University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and an Affiliated Faculty member at IIEP. Ms. Fenizia earned her BA and MS in Economics from Bocconi University and her PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley.