BUSM014: Group Project
Project Assessment and Organisation
Your understanding of quantitative methods in this module is assessed in three steps: i) two in-class worth 25% of your mark each and ii) a group-work project worth 50% of your mark. This text sets out the main aspects of the group-work element.
This element will cover a question central to the study of contemporary management: Whether firms should let their employees telecommute, namely do some or all of their work from home. The data and the study are based on Nicholas Bloom & James Liang & John Roberts & Zhichun Jenny Ying, 2015. “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 130(1), pages 165-218.
You will be assigned to groups of three/four students to work on the project described below as a team. We want you to analyse the data and report on your conclusions.
Question: Are employees working from home more or less exhausted than employees working in the office? How does working from home affect their attitudes?
Background: The study focuses on the effect of allowing workers who previously worked at the office to telecommute for four days a week. The company wanted to know whether their employees would work less hard at home or whether not having to commute and working in a more personal space would improve their concentration and effort levels. The company is a large travel agency and employees telecommuting were either taking/making bookings for trips/hotels or they were correcting orders.
Data: You will analyse the dataset “exhaustion131.dta” uploaded to QMPLUS – week 3). This data set contains measures of exhaustion and attitudes from weekly surveys of employees undertaken before and during the experiment. The data also includes background information on employees, such as gender, age, whether they have children, length of commute, etc.; and a ‘treatment’ variable, which indicates whether an employee was working from home in the week in which the data were recorded.
Deliverables:
At the end of the term (date 17.12.2019), you are expected to submit a report of 1,500 words
based on the analysis of the exhaustion data set available in QMPLUS. You are expected to report on the following aspects:
(i) Literature review on telecommuting
(ii) Descriptive statistics for the variables in the data
(iii) Graphical analysis of the main correlations in the data
(iv) Your main hypotheses and output tests of these hypotheses
(v) Regression analysis testing the same hypotheses
(vi) Your recommendations and conclusions from this analysis
We will go through each of the steps of analysis with other but related data in the seminars. Your task will be to repeat the work we do in the seminars using the data for your projects
Submission via the QMPlus Dropbox for this module. One submission per group.
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