A growing number of American workers earn income outside of traditional employee-employer relationships through self-employment and business ownership. This paper draws on administrative tax records to provide a more complete picture of the self-employed, including how they differ from employees (which we define as workers receiving wages reported on Form W2) and how their numbers...

To monitor trends in alternative work arrangements, we conducted a version of the Contingent Worker Survey as part of the RAND American Life Panel in late 2015. The findings point to a significant rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015. The percentage of workers engaged in...

Recent reports on the “gig economy” create an impression that a dizzying mix of technological and competitive forces is fundamentally reworking the landscape of employment in the United States. A central aspect of this change is the perceived rise of independent contracting as an alternative to the conventional employer-employee relationship. However, even quantifying whether and...

By the beginning of 2013, five years since the onset of the recession, there had been a loss of around seven million jobs across the European Union. On average, one in ten people were left without work, with countries such as Spain and Greece facing much higher unemployment rates. Yet one part of the labour...

The UK’s micro business population is booming. Defined as firms with 0-9 employees, there are now 5m such businesses in the UK, up from 3.5m in 2000. In contrast, the populations of all other firm sizes have either increased only marginally or fallen over the same period. The result is that micro businesses today account...