Outside Options and Labor Supply: Evidence from the Gig Economy

Caldwell thanks David Autor, Daron Acemoglu, Joshua Angrist, and Patrick Kline for guidance and support. Special thanks go to Uber's Houston city team for hosting and assisting with our study and to Christopher Ackerman, Phoebe Cai, Michael Davies, Javier Feinmann, Anran Li, Sebastian Puerta, and Tadej Svetina for excellent research assistance. We thank David Card, Alexandre Mas, Elizabeth Mishkin, Isaac Sorkin, and Todd Sorensen for helpful comments. We also thank seminar audiences at Arizona State University, Berkeley-Haas, the Bank of Italy, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, MIT, Oxford, UMass Amherst, the University of Melbourne, U Nevada-Reno, Toronto-Rotman, SOLE, the U Chicago Advances in Field Experiments conference, the CESifo Gender in the Developed \& Developing World conference, the National Tax Association Meeting, the AEA/ASSA meeting, the Columbia Junior Micro-Macro Labor Conference, the EIEF Junior Applied Micro workshop, and the NBER Summer Institute Labor Studies session. This study is registered in the AEA RCT Registry as trial no. AEARCTR-0001656. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 1122374 (Caldwell) and by the NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant No. 1729822 (Caldwell). Some of the results were previously circulated as ``Monopsony and the Gender Wage Gap: Experimental Evidence from the Gig Economy.'' The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Uber Technologies, Inc. Caldwell's work on this project was carried out under a data use agreement executed between MIT and Uber. Oehlsen is a former employee of Uber Technologies, Inc. No party reviewed this manuscript before circulation except to verify that it does not contain confidential data or information. All mistakes are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.