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Working Paper
Informal Work and Official Employment Statistics: What’s Missing?
Using eight consecutive waves of the Survey of Informal Work Participation (SIWP) spanning 2015 through 2022, we investigate informal “gig” work participation in the United States— broadly defined to include online and offline activities—and its implications for the measurement of employment. Our results suggest that employment rates among US household heads were consistently understated in the Current Population Survey (CPS). Under conservative estimates, we find that the employment-to-population ratio would have been 0.25 to 1.1 percentage points higher over the 2015–2022 period ...