Cross-border communication costs have plummeted and enabled the global distribution of work, but frictions attributable to distance persist. We estimate the causal effects of temporal distance, i.e., time zone separation between employees, on intra-firm communication, a critical means of...

Do virtual, yet informal and synchronous, interactions affect individual performance outcomes of organizational newcomers? We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at a large global organization that estimates the performance effects of “virtual water coolers” for...