Understanding Trends in Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States

Will More Workers Have Nontraditional Jobs as Globalization and Automation Spread?

“…While research on nontraditional work dates back decades (see an early review from Barker and Christensen 1998), it has gained renewed prominence in the media and among social scientists, especially after Katz and Krueger's 2016 study found an increase in so-called "alternative" arrangements from 10 percent to 15 percent of the workforce over the [2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013][2014][2015] period. Later evidence from those same authors suggested a slightly more muted upward trend in primary employment in alternative arrangements, and suggested alternative jobs are often secondary jobs (Katz and Krueger 2019). Indeed, Collins et al (2019) find evidence that, although a higher share of workers are filing IRS Form-1099s indicating independent contracting work, almost all of the growth is from people using that work as a secondary source of income.…”

Paying Outsourced Labor: Direct Evidence from Linked Temp Agency-Worker-Client Data

“…In the splitsample procedure, we find a reduced-form slope of 0.480 so that the IV analysis implies a 49.3% (0.480/0.974) relative slope. ployed through a temp agency in 2005 (source: own calculations, SIPA, described below), compared with 0.9% in temp agencies and 1.4% through contract firms in the US (calculations based on February-2005 CPS, see Table 2 in Katz and Krueger, 2018).…”

“…User firms' wage setting for outsourced labor has so far largely escaped measurement because typical datasets exclusively associate outsourced workers with their formal employer, in our case the temp agency, rather than the workplace, the user firm. This is true for surveys (in addition to the inherent challenges of measuring nonstandard work arrangements based on snapshot survey data, which has recently been documented by Abraham and Amaya, 2018;Katz andKrueger, 2018, 2019). But the challenge extends to typical administrative matched employer-employee datasets, which generally do not show links between temp agency workers and user firms.…”

Do Workers Discriminate against Their Out-Group Employers? Evidence from the Gig Economy

“…Our finding is interesting because it raises the possibility that positive social preference toward blacks, rarely detected in traditional labor markets, may emerge in environments such as the gig economy where associative distaste is naturally muted. Bear in mind, ours is a well-powered, AEA pre-registered experiment which would have detected preference-based discrimination had it existed on the M-Turk platform; the fact we don't is encouraging, seeing how the gig economy is expanding (Katz & Krueger, 2019). Further, it is oftrepeated that the relative lack of success of black-owned businesses or the diminished presence of blacks in leadership positions in the United States is a major concern among policy makers; more so, because "business ownership has historically been a route of economic advancement for disadvantaged groups" (Fairlie & Robb, 2007).…”