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The last few decades have been accompanied by disruptive changes to the structure of employment which have led to deterioration in demand for middle-skill occupations, a process known as job polarisation. As the demand for middle-skill workers shrinks, expectations about households’ income through their lifetime horizon are adjusted. It is unclear whether these expectations can loop back into the credit system, and affect the lending b ehaviour of credit institutions, or whether this process impacts on the households’ self-assessment of their opportunities to borrow money. In this paper, we study how the process of job polarisation affects credit demand and supply, studying its relationship with credit constraint and credit quality

The massive growth of jobs in the platform economy has reignited a long-standing debate on the wage elasticity of labour supply for the self-employed. Overwhelming empirical evidence seems to suggest that workers in the platform economy will work more hours than they wish to, for a lower wage, suggesting a backward-bending labour supply curve. Is this puzzling outcome explained by target earning behaviour or rather by the uncertainty arising from task search? In this paper, we test these hypotheses making use of new data on on-location and online platform workers earning on a piece-rate basis in the EU, exploiting search shocks in a difference-in-differences strategy to reassess the wage elasticity of labour supply. We find that uncertainty in search plays a central role in inflating hours of work, revealing a positive and inelastic wage elasticity for all platform workers. On average, a percentage increase in job search leads to a net loss in income, suggesting that piecework might be an endemic source of demand surplus for monopsonistic markets.

We study the impact of fake news on votes for populist parties in the Italian elections of 2018. Our empirical strategy exploits the presence of Italian- and German-speaking voters in the Italian region of Trentino Alto-Adige/Südtirol as an exogenous source of assignment to fake news exposure. Using municipal data, we compare the effect of exposure to fake news on the vote for populist parties in the 2013 and 2018 elections. To do so, we introduce a novel indicator of populism using text mining on the Facebook posts of Italian parties before the elections. We find that exposure to fake news is positively correlated with vote for populist parties, but that less than half of this correlation is causal. Our findings support the view that exposure to fake news (i) favours populist parties, but also that (ii) it is positively correlated with prior support for populist parties, suggesting a self-selection mechanism.

In this paper, we compare wages and labor market conditions of individuals engaged in online platform work and in traditional occupations by exploiting individual-level survey data on crowdworkers belonging to the largest micro-task marketplaces, focusing on evidence from the United States and Europe. To match similar individuals, survey responses of crowdworkers from the US and EU have been harmonised with the American Working Conditions Survey (AWCS) and the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS). Our findings indicate that traditional workers retain a significant premium in their earnings with respect to online platform workers, and that those differences are not affected by the observed and unobserved ability of individuals. This holds true also taking into account similar levels of routine intensity and abstractness in their jobs, as well as the time spent working. Moreover, labour force in crowdworking arrangements appears to suffer from high levels of under-utilisation, with crowdworkers being more likely to be left wanting for more work than comparable individuals.