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Abstract Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and the widespread shift to remote work, interest has grown in how these changes have affected online labor markets. We study individuals who were active in both the conventional labor market and an online labor market prior to this shock, and compare workers who were shifted from on-site to remote work in their main job with those who remained on-site. To provide insights into how changes in working conditions affect productivity in online labor markets, we utilized a unique dataset obtained from a prominent online labor marketplace. Our dataset contains several measures of worker productivity, which we analyze in conjunction with survey data collected from online workers regarding their experiences with conventional market changes. By combining these two sources of data, we are able to investigate the ways in which the pandemic-induced shift toward remote work has affected the productivity and behavior of online workers. We find that, first, the shift toward remote work during the pandemic has led to changes in the patterns of productivity in online labor markets. The transition toward remote work from home (WFH) decreased online productivity by 18%. Second, our findings suggest that the decrease in work quality among workers transitioning to WFH was primarily due to a “sloppy” work approach. Specifically, while the quantity of online work output may increase for such workers, their overall work quality tended to decline compared to those who continued to work in traditional firm environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, heterogeneity analysis reveals that workers with higher levels of neuroticism tended to exhibit better adaptability to the WFH setup by having higher online productivity. Our analysis reveals several important findings with implications for both workers and policy-makers in the gig economy.
Mourelatos et al. (Thu,) studied this question.