Documents van Slageren, Jaap 2 results

"With the emergence of the online gig economy, computer-based jobs can be completed by gig workers around the world. This raises the question whether the labour market for online gigs is truly boundless as distance no longer matters. Based on gravity models, we investigate the effect of geographical, institutional and cultural distance on almost 30 000 platform hirings between 26 European countries. While we find that online gig platforms are used to off-shore work from high- to low-wage countries, the online gig economy is not boundless as gig workers are still preferably hired from geographically close economies. A common language furthermore facilitates hirings between countries. Interestingly, though, differences in formal and informal institutions hardly affect hiring patterns across countries, suggesting that online platforms create their own institutional framework. We conclude that the online gig economy constitutes neither a boundless nor a frictionless labour market, implying that its promise of creating equal access to job opportunities is exaggerated."

"Political economists and labour sociologists alike have studied how the skill specificity of workers can be explained, as it significantly affects workers' performance. However, the emergence of the gig economy may substantially change skill hiring and specificity in online labour markets because gig workers do not need formal educational credentials to offer their services. Instead, skills are “unbundled” from occupations, and platforms provide alternative ways to signal competencies, for example, via their rating and review systems. To shed light on the applicability of existing theories to explain the skill profiles of gig workers, we examine what predicts the skills hired in the online gig economy. Based on multilevel ordinal logistic regression analyses of 2336 gig worker profiles, we show that—as in traditional labour markets—gig workers with a vocational degree and longer online work experience are hired for more specific skills. However, national labour market institutions and educational systems affect the gig workers' skill specificity in the opposite direction than in traditional labour markets. Our findings thus suggest that online gig platforms allow workers to overcome restrictions imposed by national institutions as they are hired for those skills in the online gig economy that are institutionally less facilitated in their home labour markets."