Are national borders an impediment to online collaboration in the knowledge economy? Unlike in goods trade, knowledge workers can collaborate fully virtually, such that border effects might be eliminated. Here we study collaboration patterns of some 144,000 European developers on the largest...

Are national borders an impediment to online collaboration in the knowledge economy? Unlike in goods trade, knowledge workers can collaborate fully virtually, such that border effects might be eliminated. Here we study collaboration patterns of some 144,000 European developers on the largest...

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 work settings potentially facilitate remote collaboration and thereby decrease geographic frictions in knowledge work. Here, I analyze spatial collaboration patterns of some 191 thousand software developers in the United States on the largest code repository platform GitHub. Despite...

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...