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That paper is a joke. Here's how they collected their "treatment set": > We collect RTO information for S&P 500 firms through manual news searches on Google an
by timr 3y ago
That paper is a joke. Here's how they collected their "treatment set":
> We collect RTO information for S&P 500 firms through manual news searches on Google and Factiva. Specifically, for each firm, we search by using the company’s name and the following keywords: ‘Work from Home’, ‘return to office’, and ‘days required working in the office’. We focus on S&P 500 firms because these large firms are closely followed by media, thus mitigating concerns about media coverage bias. Among the S&P 500 firms, 137 publicly announce their RTO policy and are classified as RTO firms in this study. These 137 firms become our treatment firms
They then correlate this with other (ahem) high quality datasets...like Glassdoor reviews.
Setting aside all personal biases, this is like bad undergrad research. You can't just look at titles and treat papers like pokemon cards.
- passwordoops 3y ago"this is like bad undergrad research." Unfortunately I think you just described the corpus of behavioral science over the past two decades
- timr 3y agoSadly, yes. I mainly looked out of a sense of morbid curiosity, and I was not disappointed.
- itsdrewmiller 3y agoWhat is your concern with this approach? It seems pretty reasonable to me. Obviously the better the data the less chance for some kinds of errors, but nothing here sticks out as particularly bad. (Full disclosure I didn't read the paper itself.)
- hilux 3y agoAmong many other things, sample bias.
- itsdrewmiller 3y agoSample bias in the sense that they may miss companies in the S&P 500 that aren't as well reported on (possible but I would guess not super likely), or that fortune 500 companies are not representative of companies overall (certainly true but still a reasonable scope for analysis)? Or something other than that?
- polski-g 3y agoPeople generally leave reviews because they are unhappy with a thing. That alone is sampling bias from Glassdoor. Rarely do people leave a review because they are happy with something.
- hackeracc 3y agoWhy is that a bias? When people are more unhappy, they post more negative comments. If they are less unhappy, then they post less negative comments. The bigger concern is that employers post fake positive reviews, which biases against the findings.
- hackeracc 3y agoI know researchers especially junior researchers are very critical of others’ work. But they focus on s&p 500 because theses firms are big and closely followed by media.
- thegrim33 3y agoYou can tell it's a joke from the second sentence of the abstract. They don't even attempt to pretend that they're impartial or scientific, it's 100% obvious they're coming into it from a completely biased position.