Foster, and participants at the NBER/CRIW conference on Producer Dynamics in April 2005 and at an AEA/SBA session in January 2005. We also would like to thank Paul Hanczaryk for helping us understand the Census Bureau's nonemployer data. This work has undergone a more limited review than official Census Bureau publications. The views, findings, and opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors and not the U.S. Census Bureau. All results have been reviewed to ensure confidentiality.

The rise of the "gig economy" has attracted wide attention from both scholars and the popular media. Much of this attention has been devoted to jobs mediated through various online platforms. While non-traditional work arrangements have been a perennial subject of debate and study, the perception that new technology is producing an accelerated pace of change in the organization of work has fueled a resurgence of interest in how such changes may be affecting both workers and firms. This paper provides a typology of work arrangements and reviews how different arrangements, and especially gig activity, are captured in existing data. A challenge for understanding recent trends is that household survey and administrative data paint a different picture, with the former showing little evidence of the growth in self-employment that would be implied by a surge in gig activity and the latter providing evidence of considerable recent growth. An examination of matched individual-level survey and administrative records shows that a large and growing fraction of those with self-employment activity in administrative data have no such activity recorded in household survey data. The share of those with self-employment activity in household survey data but not administrative data is smaller and has not grown. Promising avenues for improving the measurement of self-employment activity include the addition of more probing questions to household survey questionnaires and the development of integrated data sets that combine survey, administrative and, potentially, private data.

Bureau is preparing to support external researchers' use of these data under a protocol to be released in the near future. 154 John M. Abowd et al. 156 John M. Abowd et al. 157 160 John M. Abowd et al. 4. BHY specify a linear relation and emphasize the departure of coefficients from 1. Hall (1998) discusses an alternative log-linear relation that may be relevant. We use the log-linear specification in our analysis in part because our human capital measures are not on the same inherent scale and metric as the measures of assets and market value.

on earlier drafts. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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