PODCAST: How Gig Work Fuels Entrepreneurship

Drivers for ride-sharing companies, short-term renters, freelancers, and other one-off jobs are part of a growing market called the gig economy. The phenomenon is not new. It picked up steam in the early 2010s and carried it into the mid-2020s.

Recently, researchers Spyros Lagaras, a professor of finance at Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joined researchers Matt Denes from Carnegie Mellon University and Margarita Toutsoura from Washington University in St. Louis to take a closer look at how common it is for those who start these gigs, use them as a pathway to entrepreneurship. Their findings, which confirmed their suspicion, were published in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Working Paper Series and the Journal of Financial Economics. Listen in for more information in this episode of Research Reverb.

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