Episode 15 - How Gig Work Fuels Entrepreneurship

About this episode

This episode explores how gig work serves as a pathway to entrepreneurship, featuring insights from researchers in the field.

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 in 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.

People in this episode

Guests: Spyros Lagaras, Matt Denes, Margarita Toutsoura

Topics covered

• gig economy
• entrepreneurship
• freelancing
• ride-sharing

Keywords

• NBER
• Working Paper Series
• Journal of Financial Economics

Mentioned in this episode

Places: St. Louis

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