Despite much theoretical attention over the concept of procrastination and much exploration of this phenomenon in laboratory settings, there remain few empirical investigations into procrastination in real world contexts, especially in the workplace. In this paper, we attempt to fill these gaps by exploring procrastination among U.S. patent examiners. We find that nearly half of examiners' first substantive reports are completed immediately prior to the operable deadlines. Moreover, we find a range of additional empirical markers to support that this "endloading" of reviews results from a model of procrastination rather than various time-consistent models of behavior. In one such approach, we take advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the Patent Office's staggered implementation of its telecommuting program, a development that we theorize might exacerbate employee self-control problems. Supporting the procrastination theory, we estimate an immediate spike in application endloading and other indicia of procrastination upon the onset of telecommuting. Finally, we assess the consequences of procrastination for the quality of the completed reviews. This analysis suggests that the primary harm stemming from procrastination is delay in the ultimate application process, with rushed reviews completed at deadlines resulting in the need for revisions in subsequent rounds of review.
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