By | Dylan Walsh | mitsloan.mit.edu
For Sebastian Steffen, SM ’20, PhD ’22, who is starting as an assistant professor at Boston College this fall, the pandemic had a relatively minor effect on his life as a PhD student at MIT Sloan. He still conducted research after the world shut down. He still wrote papers. Being in graduate school, it turned out, was well-suited to remote work.
“But I happen to study human capital and the decisions firms make about their employees,” he said. “Naturally, I wanted to understand more about how COVID-19 impacted the lives of people and the firms they work for.”
In a recent working paper, Steffen and his co-authors looked at the work-from-home capabilities of different companies leading up to the spread of the coronavirus. The researchers found a stark divide between companies that had established strong work-from-home capabilities before the pandemic and those that had not. The paper was co-authored by Northeastern University professor John Bai, Stanford University professor Erik Brynjolfsson, PhD ’91, University of Massachusetts Boston professor Chi Wan, and MIT Sloan research scientist Wang Jin.