Solo Self-Employment and Alternative Work Arrangements: A Cross-Country Perspective on the Changing Composition of Jobs

Tito Boeri, Giulia Giupponi, Alan Krueger and Stephen Machin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2020, vol. 34, issue 1, 170-95

Abstract: The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work and alternative work arrangements. We still know little about this changing composition of jobs. Drawing on ad-hoc surveys run in the UK, US, and Italy, we document that solo self-employment is substantively different from self-employment with employees, being an intermediate status between employment and unemployment, and for some, becoming a new frontier of underemployment. Its spread originates a strong demand for social insurance which rarely meets an adequate supply given the informational asymmetries of these jobs. Enforcing minimum wage legislation on these jobs and reconsidering the preferential tax treatment offered to self-employment could discourage abuse of these positions to hide de facto dependent employment jobs. Improved measures of labor slack should be developed to acknowledge that, over and above unemployment, some of the solo self-employment and alternative work arrangements present in today's labor market are placing downward pressure on wages.

JEL-codes: H24 J23 J31 J38 J64 K31 K34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (84)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/jep.34.1.170 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/jep.34.1.170.data (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/jep.34.1.170.appx (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/jep.34.1.170.ds (application/zip)

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:jecper:v:34:y:2020:i:1:p:170-95

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

DOI: 10.1257/jep.34.1.170

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Perspectives is currently edited by Enrico Moretti

More articles in Journal of Economic Perspectives from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().