Otto Kässi's research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

... Here, we examine the global geography of remote freelance work mediated by online labour platforms empirically based on a data set covering 1.8 million remote jobs from 2013 to 2020 to show that remote platform work mirrors the geographical and skill-based polarisation of labour markets at large [31]. The data comes from one platform, which is among the largest in terms of global market shares [8,32]. In the discussion section, we consider what implications our findings may have for remote platform work more generally and other types of remote work, including regular employment performed remotely over the Internet. ...

... First, online gig platforms lower search costs by publicly showing the profiles of gig providers, including their CVs, work portfolios and skill tests. Platforms also provide performance ratings of both gig requesters and providers (Agrawal et al., 2013;Gomez-Herrera et al., 2017;Kä ssi and Lehdonvirta, 2019). In this way, gig requesters can immediately assess the workers' skill types, work portfolios and past performance. ...

... Rather, these people will work on a freelance-basis by performing a number of " gigs" for other ( and not seldom multiple) contractors, hence the term " gig economy" ( Larsson & Sabolová, 2020;Shibata, 2020). While the exact number is subject to definition and approximation, there were, as of 2021, an estimated 163 million freelancers, or " gig workers", registered on online labour platforms globally ( Kässi, Lehdonvirta, & Stephany, 2021). In 2015, the estimated figure was 45 million people worldwide ( Gandini, 2018). ...

... As a result, a disproportionate number of workers on online freelancing platforms have earned at least a bachelor's degree (Ross et al. 2010;Bertschek et al. 2016;. The mismatch between the average education of the general population and the people who work as online freelancers is especially high in developing countries (Berg et al. 2018;Braesemann et al. 2021). Because of the specific skill requirements in online freelancing, building longer-term relationships with workers who have done a good job in the past is often advantageous for requesters. ...

... In recent years, an increasing number of workers worldwide have found jobs outside traditional organisations, instead finding work on digital platforms such as Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon Mechanical Turk and Upwork (Kässi & Lehdonvirta, 2018;Petriglieri et al., 2019;Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020). Scholars have estimated that around 160 million workers operate in the gig economy, finding work on such platforms (Kässi et al., 2021). The gig economy may offer opportunities to workers, especially to those in low-income countries, who often gain better and more lucrative employment on the platforms than through local employment (Wood et al., 2019a). ...

... Workers in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) have emerged as a growing labour force on such platforms, which is exemplified by India's share of the global online worker population having grown from 25 per cent in 2017 to 33 per cent in 2021. Some 43 per cent of all online project demands on platforms are in the field of software development and technology (Stephany et al., 2021). ...

... Such working arrangements offer a source of easily accessible supplementary income via the performance of small tasks online at a time and place convenient to the worker. The Online Labour Index aimed to measure the supply and demand of online freelance work (as a part of gig economy) shows that demand for such work has increased significantly 32 . In early 2021, almost 90% more projects were demanded via online freelance platforms than in mid-2016, which equals an annual growth rate of 10%. ...

... The attractiveness of crowdworking lies in its business model, which enables the near-instant worldwide matching of workers and requesters on online labor market platforms (Shafiei Gol et al. 2018;De Stefano 2015). Kässi et al. (2021) estimate that 19 million people were active on crowdworking platforms worldwide by the end of 2020, with the number of active workers steadily increasing over the years. A particularly strong increase in crowdworkers recently occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic (Stephany et al. 2020), when many companies closed their offices and working from home became mandatory, especially for the chronically ill. ...

... Due to the digital organisation of the hiring and work process on the platform, online labour markets can be considered as a prototype of a fully remote labour market. Having started as niche marketplaces for IT freelancers, these platforms now cover the whole spectrum of knowledge work, from data entry to management consulting, with millions of platform workers involved globally [6][7][8], and rising adoption during the Covid-19 pandemic [9]. The platform labour market has in fact seen substantial growth in recent years. ...

... In addition, academic research on the measurement system (Mesenbourg ,2001;Bukht and Heeks, 2018;Barefoot et al., 2018) and the impact effect (Popkova and Gulzat, 2019;Bulturbayevich and Jurayevich, 2020;Abdurakhmanova et al., 2020) of the digital economy is also flourishing. It is generally believed that the development of the digital economy can effectively promote the upgrading of industrial structure (Su et al., 2021), improve innovation efficiency (Sultana et al., 2021;Pan et al., 2022) and narrow the gap between urban and rural areas Braesemann et al., 2022). In the research on the fiscal and tax effects of digital economy development, the existing literature mainly focuses on the impact of the digital economy on local government tax revenue (Akdogan, 2021; and fiscal sustainability, which indirectly indicates the impact of digital economy development on local fiscal pressure. ...