By offering low-barrier employment opportunities, gig work creates employment options for individuals with low labor market attachment. However, there is little evidence on the labor market effects of taking up gig work for migrant workers and refugees. In this paper, we analyze how the availability of gig work impacts refugees’ labor market integration in Austria. We first tackle the issue that the gig economy is typically not observed in administrative data sets. To this aim, we develop a novel approach to characterize Online Food Delivery (OFD) companies in Austrian administrative data. We then construct a regional measure for the availability of gig work and exploit the quasi-random spatial allocation of refugees across states and their temporary exclusion from the Austrian labor market to evaluate the effect of having gig work available on refugees’ short-term labor market outcomes. Our results suggest that refugees who are exposed to a higher level of gig availability have a significantly higher probability of being employed shortly after gaining access to the Austrian labor market. This effect is by a substantial part driven by the increased take-up of non-regular work arrangements. By additionally exploiting the variation within a local labor market, we find that the positive short-term employment effects become less pronounced for individuals who have a high predicted propensity to work in gig jobs, while effects for non-regular work arrangements persist. This, in turn, results in higher job turnover and less job stability, suggesting that at most, gig work is rather substituting traditional work in the short term of labor market integration.

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%#Recommended citation: Your Name, You. (2009). “Paper Title Number 1.” Journal 1. 1(1).