Gravity in Online Collaborations

Abstract

To which extent are geographic and cultural barriers relevant for modern, knowledge-intensive production processes that can be completely virtual? Using microdata from GitHub, the world's largest online platform for software projects, we estimate a gravity model at the city-level and show that distance, country borders, and language matter for virtual collaborations. Collaborations are significantly more likely to originate within the same city. Conditional on distance, the country border and language barriers remain economically important. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of geographic distance decreased. Further project-level analysis suggests that ex-ante distributed teams were relatively less affected by the pandemic than colocated teams.