Crowdwork for Young People: Risks and Opportunities

Shane Niall O'Higgins and Luis Pinedo Caro

No 14933, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In recent years, crowdworking has emerged as a small but rapidly growing source of employment and income principally for young(er) people. Here, we build on previous work in identifying the determinants of crowdworkers' earnings. We focus on the reasons why young crowdworkers earn significantly higher hourly wages than their older counterparts. We show that this is due to the higher returns to experience accruing to younger crowd-workers. Educational attainment does not explain this age-based differential, as education is a negligible factor in determining crowdworkers' earnings. We also analyse why young women earn around 20% less than their male counterparts despite blind hiring. We confirm that this is partly explained by constraints on working time faced by women with children. The analysis also shows that 'freely chosen' crowdwork - as opposed to, young people crowd-working because of a lack of alternative employment opportunities - is conducive to higher levels of job satisfaction. Moreover, young crowdworkers in middle income countries earn less than their counterparts in high income countries but report higher levels of job satisfaction. This is entirely attributable to the lower quality of their options outside of crowdwork.

Keywords: crowdsourcing platforms; global labour markets; job satisfaction; youth employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F41 J20 J41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lma and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14933.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Crowdwork for young people risks and opportunities (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14933

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().