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1. Labor Rationing

   https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20201385  

   Breza, Emily; Kaur, Supreet; Shamdasani, Yogita (October 2021, American Economic Review)

   This paper measures excess labor supply in equilibrium. We induce hiring shocks—which employ 24 percent of the labor force in external month-long jobs—in Indian local labor markets. In peak months, wages increase instantaneously and local aggregate employment declines. In lean months, consistent with severe labor rationing, wages and aggregate employment are unchanged, with positive employment spillovers on remaining workers, indicating that over a quarter of labor supply is rationed. At least 24 percent of lean self-employment among casual workers occurs because they cannot find jobs. Consequently, traditional survey approaches mismeasure labor market slack. Rationing has broad implications for labor market analysis. (JEL E24, J22, J23, J31, J64, O15, R23) 

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2. Red flags, sob stories, and scams: The contested meaning of governance on carework labor platforms

   https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099233  

   Ticona, Julia (July 2022, New Media & Society)

   Labor platform scams are an opportunity to integrate scholarship about governance across social media and labor platforms. Labor platforms have borrowed governance mechanisms from social media to cultivate trust among users and remove problematic content. However, while these platforms may share governance strategies, labor platforms mediate employment relationships between workers and clients with different amounts of power. Based on a multistakeholder ethnography of carework labor platforms, online careworker forums, and interviews, this study describes scams on carework labor platforms. Labor platforms narrate workers into the role of technology consumers, constricting their own obligations to workers. Workers’ explanations of scams vary, with some contesting and others aligning with platform narratives. Some workers seek support in online forums, which remediate the harm of scams for some but also enroll workers in unpaid labor. These scams challenge the assumption of antagonism between the interests of workers and platform companies and highlight the consumerization of work. 

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3. A Collective Colony Migration Model with Hill Functions in Recruitment

   https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218127422502133  

   Wang, Lisha; Qiu, Zhipeng; Kang, Yun (November 2022, International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos)

   Social insect colonies’ robust and efficient collective behaviors without any central control contribute greatly to their ecological success. Colony migration is a leading subject for studying collective decision-making in migration. In this paper, a general colony migration model with Hill functions in recruitment is proposed to investigate the underlying decision making mechanism and the related dynamical behaviors. Our analysis provides the existence and stability of equilibrium, and the global dynamical behavior of the system. To understand how piecewise functions and Hill functions in recruitment impact colony migration dynamics, the comparisons are performed in both analytic results and bifurcation analysis. Our theoretical results show that the dynamics of the migration system with Hill functions in recruitment differs from that of the migration system with piecewise functions in the following three aspects: (1) all population components in our colony migration model with Hill functions in recruitment are persistent; (2) the colony migration model with Hill functions in recruitment has saddle and saddle-node bifurcations, while the migration system with piecewise functions does not; (3) the system with Hill functions has only equilibrium dynamics, i.e. either has a global stability at one interior equilibrium or has bistablity among two locally stable interior equilibria. Bifurcation analysis shows that the geometrical shape of the Hill functions greatly impacts the dynamics: (1) the system with flatter Hill functions is less likely to exhibit bistability; (2) the system with steeper functions is prone to exhibit bistability, and the steady state of total active workers is closer to that of active workers in the system with piecewise function. 

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4. Uncovering the Promises and Challenges of Social Media Use in the Low-Wage Labor Market: Insights from Employers

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445774  

   Lu, Alex Jiahong; Dillahunt, Tawanna R. (January 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.)

   null (Ed.)

   Social media has become an effective recruitment tool for higher-waged and white-collar professionals. Yet, past studies have questioned its effectiveness for the recruitment of lower-waged workers. It is also unclear whether or how employers leverage social media in their recruitment of low-wage job seekers, and how social media could better support the needs of both stakeholders. Therefore, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with employers of low-wage workers in the U.S. We found that employers: use social media, primarily Facebook, to access large pools of active low-wage job seekers; and recognize indirect signals about low-wage job seekers’ commitment and job readiness. Our work suggests that there remains a visible, yet unaddressed power imbalance between low-wage workers and employers in the use of social media, which risks further destabilizing the precarious labor market. 

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5. Who Gets Caught in the Net? The Expanded Safety Net During Covid-19 and Precarious Workers

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X261435181  

   Ravenelle, Alexandrea J; Nazareno, Luisa; Zhang, Yue (April 2026, Labor Studies Journal)

   We examine how the expansion of social protection policies during Covid-19 affected workers’ job outcomes (employment probability and income changes) and access to the safety net. Leveraging a panel of 173 US workers across three arrangements—platform-based gig workers, creative freelancers, and low-wage W-2 employees—tracked from 2020–2024, we find that gig workers initially faced unemployment insurance access barriers, resulting in a 50%-point higher likelihood of receiving benefits later in the crisis than low-wage W-2 workers. Creative freelancers were more likely to remain employed and experienced fewer income losses. This paper shows that flexibilizing regulation may counter global labor precarity trends. 

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