The Rise of the Gig Economy: Fact or Fiction?

Katharine Abraham, John Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky and James Spletzer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2019, vol. 109, 357-61

Abstract: Gig work mediated through online platforms has received much recent attention. We find only one sector—the transportation services sector—in which there is unambiguous evidence of substantial and rapidly growing gig activity. A challenge for tracking and understanding the rise in gig activity is that core household surveys are missing the recent overall rise in self-employment that is apparent in administrative and private sector transactions data. We show that this limitation of available household survey data is evident even in the transportation services sector, where the growth in self-employment activity since 2013 has been exponential.

JEL-codes: J22 J23 L84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20191039
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pandp.20191039 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pandp.20191039.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
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:aea:apandp:v:109:y:2019:p:357-61

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/subscribe.html

Access Statistics for this article

AEA Papers and Proceedings is currently edited by William Johnson and Kelly Markel

More articles in AEA Papers and Proceedings from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().