Speaking as a Jew living in Diaspora, who needs to exist as a minority at a time of rising antisemitism, I would really appreciate it if the Prime Minister of a country where I do not live would not say that attacks on a sovereign country are analogous to attacks on a synagogue.
Some are indeed doing that now, I believe.
Thanks! I’d caution that those are error bounds measuring statistical uncertainty over the mean estimates, not estimates of distributional effects.
Why: Depends who you ask. Some suspect apps want drivers to oppose the new laws. Apps say they don’t want customers to feel pressured to pay higher fees and more tips.
The subtext is that apps took it for granted (and try to encourage) ppl will 5-10 dollars when setting pay before
I don’t think drives our main results but there is definitely a follow up paper to be written just about the tip shenanigans and the NY ban on such shenanigans
nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/01/13/d...
Cool paper and highlights the trade-offs often involved in policy, especially with new employment relationships like in the gig economy. As the author says, the way to actually increase pay for workers is to have barriers to entry (1/4)
Of course, barriers to entry also undermine the flexibility benefits of gig work for workers who need ways to earn extra cash at key moments. Our findings suggest that there is no easy win-win with minimum pay regulations.
13/13
Raising pay is possible but probably requires imposing some kind of barrier to entry—remember how the taxi sector used to use medallions and other licensing requirements to ensure high driver pay rates?
12/
⚠️ The punch line: With free entry into gig markets, it is *very* hard to raise anyone's earnings with per-task pay regulation.
11/
➡️ Since there are minimal barriers to entry, any increase in earnings opportunities leads the supply of drivers to rise until the longer queue times roughly offset the benefits of higher pay per delivery.
10/
➡️ So when higher pay per delivery attracts new drivers to gig work, as customer demand falls due to higher prices, *all* drivers face longer queues for deliveries.
9/
➡️ In gig markets, unlike "standard" labor markets, there is no distinction between people who are employed and unemployed: *everyone* looking for work queues for delivery tasks, which get distributed across the whole group.
8/
These results suggest that gig markets differ from standard labor markets in key ways, that create unique challenges for pay regulation. Namely:
7/
2️⃣ Tip income, which accounts for the *majority* of delivery driver pay and is not covered by pay standards, went down. Some of that was organic as customers faced higher delivery fees, but some was accelerated by apps disabling tipping at checkout in Seattle after the reform.
6/
1️⃣ Drivers were completing fewer trips per day, even though they seem to be spending the same amount of time on the apps. It looks like drivers have to endure more time and distance off the clock to find tasks to do.
5/
We clearly see that base pay per delivery unambiguously rose after the reform. But two other things also happened:
4/
We spent a lot of time digging into the data to see what was going on. Could this have been some issue in how we constructed the data, or how we did our analysis?
With a lot of work, it became clear that this *wasn't* a fluke.
3/
Usually, minimum wages at least raise earnings of covered workers, even if there are other tradeoffs.
But that's not what my colleagues and I found. We found that deliver drivers in Seattle earned about the *same* after the reform as they did before.
2/
Data-driven research, at its best, presents you with results that surprise you. 😲
When I began studying Seattle's minimum pay standard for delivery drivers, I personally expected to see high-attachment delivery drivers making more money after the policy went into effect. 1/13
Good post by @joshgans.bsky.social on why the scientific publishing system will not collapse from the rise of AI-supported research. open.substack.com/pub/joshuaga...
Congrats!
Excited to join the panel "Innovation, Production, and Supply Chains in Critical Technologies" at CMU moderated by @andygarin.bsky.social and Erica Fuchs this Wednesday, 2/26 at 2pm! If you're in Pittsburgh, come say hi!
www.cs.cmu.edu/calendar/197...
I could be wrong, but my recollection is that the result is about relative wages (I.e the w/r ratio), not about wage increases per se. Capital could get slammed without labor benefiting.
Incredible.
Person who was fired here - you should still trust BLS data. The agency is being run by the same dedicated career staff who were running it while I was awaiting confirmation from the Senate. And the staff have made it clear that they are blowing a loud whistle if there is interference.
core part of the ostensible economic justification for mass deportation was that Americans would rush in to take all the jobs immigrants left, but now unemployment rates for native born Americans are rising and the admin is sending people out to do damage control
This is tremendous. Take the time to watch it.
I am excited to be hiring two post-doctoral positions at UCLA--please share with your networks. www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.....
Working on your PhD? Looking for dissertation funding?
The Russell Sage Foundation and the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research jointly support dissertation research on employment-related topics in any discipline.
#Fundsocsci, #Econsky, @russellsagefdn.bsky.social
DOJ has since killed this link. This is what was there:
