Designing benefits for the growing platform workforce in the U.S. poses significant challenges. While platform workers need protection against unforeseen shocks, work that is often part time and spread across multiple platforms makes the traditional benefits model untenable. This paper reports...

Despite the adoption of no-fault Workers' Compensation legislation in most states, there is substantial litigation over the issue of employer liability for injury claims. We develop a sequential asymmetric information model of liability disputes and estimate the model using data on injury claims...

Implementation of workplace policies--whether through enforcement of laws or administration of programs--raises the question of the interaction between institutions created to carry out laws and the activities of workplace based agents that directly (e.g. unions) or indirectly (e.g. insurance...

It is argued in many circles that a structural change occurred in U.S. collective bargaining in the 1980s. We investigate the extent to which the hiring of replacement workers can account for this change. For a sample of over 300 major strikes since 1980, we estimate the likelihood of...

We examine decentralization of digital platforms through tokenization as an innovation to resolve the conflict between platforms and users. By delegating control to users, tokenization through utility tokens acts as a commitment device that prevents a platform from exploiting users. This...

General purpose technologies (GPTs) push out the production possibility frontier and are of strategic importance to managers and policymakers. While theoretical models that explain the characteristics, benefits, and approaches to create and capture value from GPTs have advanced significantly,...

We explore the impact of wage offers on job applications, testing implications of the directed search model and trying to distinguish it from random search. We use a field experiment conducted on a Chinese job board, with real jobs for which we randomly varied the wage offers across three...

A policy debate centers around the question how news aggregators such as Google News affect traffic to online news sites. Many publishers view aggregators as substitutes for traditional news consumption while aggregators view themselves as complements because they make news discovery easier. We...

We use data from a large web-based job platform to study how the price of remote work is determined in a globalized labor market. In the platform, workers from around the world compete for jobs that can be done remotely. We document that, despite the global nature of the marketplace, the...

Digital platforms are not only match-making intermediaries but also establish internal rules that govern all users in their ecosystems. To better understand the governing role of platforms, we study two Airbnb pro-guest rules that pertain to guest and host cancellations, using data on Airbnb and...