Much of today's software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...

Digital tools potentially enable remote collaboration. Analyzing how some 191 thousand software developers in the United States collaborate on the largest online opensource code repository platform, I find 79.8% of users clustering in only ten economic areas. Conditional on economic-area...