SUMMARY We study the rise of the so-called ‘gig economy’ through the lens of Uber and its drivers in the United Kingdom. Using administrative data from Uber and a new representative survey of London drivers, we explore their backgrounds, earnings, and subjective well-being. We find that the vast majority of Uber drivers are male immigrants, primarily drawn from the bottom half of the London income distribution. Most transitioned out of permanent part- or full-time jobs and about half of drivers’ report that their incomes increased after partnering with Uber. After covering vehicle operation costs and Uber’s service fee, we estimate that the median London driver earns about £11 per hour spent logged into the app. But while Uber drivers remain at the lower end of the London income distribution, they report higher levels of life satisfaction than other workers. Consistent with a trade-off between evaluative and emotional well-being observed among the self-employed, they also report higher anxiety levels. We hypothesize that the higher life satisfaction among Uber drivers partly reflects their preferences for flexibility and the autonomy that the platform offers. We provide suggestive evidence showing that drivers who emphasize flexibility as an important motivation to join Uber also report higher levels of subjective well-being. However, a minority of drivers who report that they would prefer work as an employee report lower levels of life satisfaction and higher levels of anxiety. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of non-monetary factors in shaping the welfare of workers in the gig economy.

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This paper uses city-level data to examine the impact of a first wave of railroad construction in Sweden, between 1855 and 1870, from the 19th century until today. We estimate that railroads accounted for 50% of urban growth, 1855-1870. In cities with access to the railroad network, property values were higher, manufacturing employment increased, establishments were larger, and more information was distributed through local post offices. Today, cities with early access to the network are 62% larger and to be found 11 steps higher in the urban hierarchy, compared to initially similar cities. We hypothesize that railroads set in motion a path dependent process that shapes the economic geography of Sweden today.

Section one provides examples of new technologyrelated industries that appeared for the first time between 2000 and 2010. Section two presents worker-level regressions, showing that skilled workers are more likely to be employed in new industries. Section three provides additional robustness checks that are referred to in the main paper. Finally, section four graphically shows differences in new industry creation across the 722 U.S. Commuting Zones.

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A large literature emphasizes that elite capture of political institutions hampered the spread of mass schooling in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We collect new data on investments in elementary education and the distribution of voting rights for more than 2,000 local governments in nineteenth‐century Sweden and document that educational expenditure was higher where the distribution of political power was more unequal. In particular, areas governed by local landed elites—even those where a single landowner had de jure dictatorial powers—invested substantially more in mass schooling relative to areas where political power was more widely shared, or where it lay in the hands of capitalist elites. Our findings lend quantitative support to an earlier literature produced by economic and social historians which argues that landed elites advanced mass schooling as part of their historical role as patrons of the local community and as a response to the increasing proletarianization of the rural population, while also furthering our understanding of how Sweden maintained a high level of human capital despite its low level of economic development and restricted franchise in the nineteenth century.

Intergenerational mobility has remained stable over recent decades in the United States but varies sharply across the country. In this article, I document that areas with more prevalent slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War exhibit substantially less upward mobility today. I find a negative link between prior slavery and contemporary mobility within states, when controlling for a wide range of historical and contemporary factors including income and inequality, focusing on the historical slave states, using a variety of mobility measures, and when exploiting geographical differences in the suitability for cultivating cotton as an instrument for the prevalence of slavery. As a first step to disentangle the underlying channels of persistence, I examine whether any of the five broad factors highlighted by Chetty et al. (2014a) as the most important correlates of upward mobility—family structure, income inequality, school quality, segregation, and social capital—can account for the link between earlier slavery and current mobility. More fragile family structures in areas where slavery was more prevalent, as reflected in lower marriage rates and a larger share of children living in single-parent households, is seemingly the most relevant to understand why it still shapes the geography of opportunity in the United States.