Online platforms are allowing us to trade used goods more easily than before. Similarly, sites like UpWork and Uber are making it easier to trade small blocks of human labor. Since the gig economy is growing (as documented by Dimitri Koustas), it’s important to understand how it is affecting workers.

Liya Palagashvili of Mercatus has a working paper with Paoula Suarez “Women as Independent Workers in the Gig Economy” examining particularly how the growing opportunities to work on a gig basis has affected women in different ways than men. They note, for example, that (in 2014–2015) 87 percent of independent workers on the Etsy platform were female, while 14 percent of workers on Uber’s platform were female.

Abstract: New technologies and digital platforms have ushered in a rise of gig, freelance, contract, and other types of independent work. Although independent workers and the gig economy as a whole have received plenty of attention, little research has examined the heterogeneity of work characteristics among different independent work opportunities, specifically as it relates to the participation of women in this workforce. Existing data indicate that some digital platforms are more male dominated, whereas others are more female dominated. What accounts for these differences? In this paper, we empirically examine the heterogeneity of work within independent work opportunities in relation to female participation by analyzing work characteristics in the United States from the Occupational Information Network (O*Net) database that reflect greater temporal flexibility, which has been shown to vary across occupations and to attract more female workers. Our findings suggest that women in the independent work context do self-select into the types of independent work jobs that reflect greater temporal flexibility, as is the case for women working in traditional employment. However, our findings also reveal that the way in which the existing literature measures temporal flexibility in traditional work settings may not be the same as the way it is measured in the context of independent work. We discuss the implications of our findings for public policy and labor laws. (emphasis mine)

Dmitri Koustas of U. Chicago has a forthcoming paper “Is New Platform Work Different than Other Freelancing?”

Abstract: The rise of freelance work in the online platform economy (OPE) has received considerable media and policy attention in recent years, but freelance work is by no means a new phenomenon. In this paper, we draw on I.R.S. tax records to identify instances when workers begin doing online platform work versus other freelance/independent contractor “gig” work for firms. We find gig work occurs around major reductions in outside income, and document usage over the lifecycle. Our results provide suggestive evidence on motivations for entering into each type of work. (emphasis mine)

His work was cited in the LA Times last year

people take on this work primarily because they’ve lost a job or some of their income — and particularly for younger workers, app-based services have been significantly more lucrative than more traditional side hustles.

I got to (virtually) talk to Dmitri Koustas, who is now a leading expert on gig work, this week. He became interested in the gig economy when he was thinking through a more traditional econ. question of generally how people modulate their labor supply in response to income shocks.

He also has a working paper “Is Gig Work Replacing Traditional Employment? Evidence from Two Decades of Tax Returns”

First half of the Abstract: We examine the universe of tax returns in order to reconcile seemingly contradictory facts about the rise of alternative work arrangements in the United States. Focusing on workers in the “1099 workforce,” we document the share of the workforce with income from alternative, non-employee work arrangements has grown by 1.9 percentage points of the workforce from 2000 to 2016. More than half of this increase occurred over 2013 to 2016 and can be attributed almost entirely to dramatic growth among gigs mediated through online labor platforms. We find that the rise in online platform work for labor is driven by earnings that are secondary and supplemental sources of income. Many of these jobs do not show up in self-employment tax records… (emphasis mine)