In the mid-2010s, as Uber was becoming a fixture in American cities, Jordan Nickerson found himself doing what many riders do: chatting with the people behind the wheel. They weren’t who he expected.
“You get people who are like, oh, I was an engineer, and I’m between jobs or this or that,” he recalls. “And you start to think, that’s a weird way people are using this that I never really thought about before.”
That observation stayed with him. The study it inspired, published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2025, is one of the most detailed examinations to date of what happens to laid-off workers’ finances when gig work is available to them.
How workers bridge the gap after a layoff
When someone loses a job, they generally have a few options to bridge the gap: tap savings, run up a credit card, apply for unemployment insurance, or find some other way to earn. Nickerson, an Associate Professor of Finance and Business Economics and the Peter and Noydena Brix Fellow at the Foster School of Business, wanted to understand how the arrival of ride-sharing changed that calculus.
“The ultimate question was thinking about how much people use the gig economy as a stopgap,” he says. “Instead of the other traditional ways, I would supplement my income while I’m looking for my next job — things like unemployment insurance, or just building up my credit card debt.”
The study drew on data covering roughly a quarter of all U.S. job separations from 2011 to 2017.
It found that, after a layoff, workers with access to Uber carried about $689 less in total debt than similar workers in cities where Uber had not yet launched. They were also about 3.3% less likely to collect unemployment insurance benefits. Most striking to Nickerson was that they were less likely to fall behind on payments, with delinquency rates dropping by roughly 4.9%. That suggested gig work was not just replacing one short-term option with another; for some laid-off workers, it appeared to provide enough income to help keep them current on their bills.
A 15-year-old car as a research tool
There’s a methodological challenge at the heart of this kind of study: Uber doesn’t share data on who its drivers are. Nickerson and his co-authors — Vyacheslav Fos, Naser Hamdi, and Ankit Kalda — couldn’t directly observe who actually turned to ride-sharing after a layoff. So they found a workaround.
The solution was Uber’s own eligibility rule: Drivers must have a car less than 15 years old. A driver with a 14-year-old car and a driver with a 16-year-old car would likely look similar in many ways — income, demographics, financial profile — but only one of them could drive for Uber.
Because Uber entered different cities at different times, it created a natural experiment. Researchers could compare what happened to laid-off workers in cities where Uber had arrived with what happened in cities where it hadn’t yet. The study measured effects across a population of eligible workers, without knowing precisely what share of them actually turned to the platform.
Jordan Nickerson will teach in Foster’s new Master of Science in Finance program, where the numbers are only part of the story.
Gig work as a bridge, not a destination
The findings suggest workers were making practical tradeoffs. State unemployment benefits, or UI, caps ranged from as little as $235 a week to as much as $679. The effects of Uber’s presence were strongest where those benefits were lowest, suggesting that when unemployment wasn’t enough to cover basic expenses, gig work became a more attractive alternative.
“This is showing there are some people for whom unemployment insurance is not enough, but Uber is,” Nickerson says.
The effects were also present among workers who returned to traditional employment within a year, suggesting most people were using the platform as a bridge rather than a permanent alternative. And rather than simply waiting out their unemployment on UI benefits, workers appear to have been actively seeking income.
“People know they could get some money by applying for UI, but they’re still putting in effort and working to get a little more money than that,” Nickerson says. “It’s a kind of self-empowerment.”
When the data doesn’t exist, neither does the answer
For all the ingenuity of the research design, Nickerson is the first to acknowledge how much he couldn’t see. Uber provided entry dates for roughly 120 markets, but no records of who drove.
“We can see a potential effect, but we can’t properly gauge the magnitude,” Nickerson says. “It’s consistent evidence, but it’s not giving us a precise value like we could have done if we had access to that data.”
While the study focused on Uber, Nickerson believes the findings could extend to other gig platforms that enable people to earn money using the assets or skills they already have — a car, a trade, a flexible schedule — as long as the work pays enough to matter.
Each new platform offers another chance to understand how flexible work changes people’s financial lives. But running those studies requires data that platforms have little incentive to share. Until that changes, researchers will keep seeing only part of the picture, even as gig work becomes a bigger part of how laid-off workers stay afloat.
Jordan Nickerson is an Associate Professor of Finance and Business Economics and the Peter and Noydena Brix Fellow at the Foster School of Business. He will teach in the school’s new Master of Science in Finance program, where students engage with the kinds of real-world financial questions explored in his research.
Read the research paper: “Gig Labor: Trading Safety Nets for Steering Wheels” — Vyacheslav Fos, Naser Hamdi, Ankit Kalda, and Jordan Nickerson. Published in the Journal of Financial Economics, 2025.