中文摘要
我们通过评估加泰罗尼亚司法系统一项强制重返办公室(RTO)政策,估计了公共部门取消居家办公(WFH)对生产率的影响。利用各法院在强制政策实施前居家办公强度的跨法院差异,双重差分估计显示,终止居家办公使有记录的程序性产出减少了5.2%,而文书质量或缺勤情况没有可检测到的变化。一项涵盖多方利益相关者的调查显示,居家办公带来的这些可记录收益与外部使用者所报告的协调成本并存:有记录的案件处理任务在数字平台上完成,便于远程执行和监督;而与律师的协调则是同步进行的,难以在办公场所之外完成,且大部分未被记录。感知到的影响呈梯度分布:身处行政效率边际观察者位置的案件管理人员与主管对居家办公持正面态度,而依赖服务协调的律师则明显持负面态度。
Abstract
We estimate the productivity effects of eliminating work from home (WFH) in the public sector by evaluating a mandatory return-to-office (RTO) policy in the Catalan judiciary. Leveraging cross-court variation in pre-mandate WFH intensity, difference-in-differences estimates show that terminating WFH reduced recorded procedural output by 5.2 percent, with no detectable changes in document quality or absenteeism. A multi-stakeholder survey shows that these recorded gains from WFH coexisted with coordination costs reported by external users: recorded case-processing tasks are performed on a digital platform, easy to do remotely and to monitor, whereas coordination with lawyers is synchronous, harder to do off-site, and largely unrecorded. Perceived impacts follow a gradient: case managers and supervisors, who observe the bureaucratic-efficiency margin, are positive about WFH, while lawyers, who depend on service coordination, are clearly negative.