The past decade has seen an explosion in the market for "gig" workers who provide a wide variety of services for "platform companies" that contract for their services but do not count them as employees. Most notable is the growth in work at Transportation Network Companies (TNC) for which individuals drive customers from place to place (such as Uber and Lyft) and Delivery Network Companies (DNC) for which individuals drive goods from place to place (such as DoorDash and InstaCart). But the gig economy has exploded along other dimensions as well, such as freelancers on sites like Upwork and even crafts creation on Etsy.
Authors
- Acknowledgements and disclosures
- I am grateful to the Brookings Institution for funding and to Miriam Chaum, Richard Frank, Sherry Glied, Mark Iwry, Libby Mishkin and Wendell Primus for helpful comments.The study described in this report was funded by Uber Technologies and published by NBER. Uber Technologies had the right to review that research for factual accuracy but did not have control of the editorial content. The author did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or, other than the aforementioned, from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. The author is not currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article.The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.
- Published in
- United States of America
