The Labor Market Effects of Regulating Platform Work: Evidence from Chile

Omar Bamieh, Juan J Dolado, Alvaro Janez and Felix Wellschmied

No 21541, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Chile’s 2022 Platform Work Law mandates firms to monitor their subcontractors’ formality and establishes maximum working hours, minimum pay, and the right to collective bargaining among independent contractors. Chile further stands out worldwide for providing a comprehensive and nationally representative dataset for platform work that allows us to track workers’ labor market outcomes over 2020-2024. By means of DiD and event study regressions, we find that this reform induced an 8-percentage-point shift from the share of informal to formal subcontractors with no change in the share of employees. Moreover, there were no significant changes in collective bargaining, compliance with minimum pay and maximum hours, or wage differentials between employees and subcontractors. The changes in hiring practices and wages are consistent with a structural labor market model where firms hire employees and formal and informal subcontractors. The calibrated model also shows that the reform reduced platforms’ profits, while strictly enforcing hours regulations would lead to very small welfare losses.

Keywords: Platforms; Employees (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21541 (application/pdf)

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:cpr:ceprdp:21541

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21541

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().