Ride-Sharing the Wealth: Effects of Uber and Lyft on Jobs, Wages and Economic Growth

Between 2010 and 2019, Uber and Lyft launched in hundreds of cities across the United States. During that decade, these transportation network companies (TNCs) frequently asserted that their ridesourcing services brought increased jobs, wages and economic growth to the cities they served. Many such claims emphasized job flexibility for drivers, increased mobility for passengers, and the combined potential of both populations to stimulate economic activity. We test these claims by leveraging the staggered entry of Uber and Lyft across 167 service regions nationwide to estimate the aggregate effects on jobs, wages and regional GDP using difference-in-differences approaches that generate consistent estimates in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. We find that Uber and Lyft entry led to an increase in both regional gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and in seasonal, temporary, or otherwise intermittent employment per working age population. We do not detect statistically significant effects on overall employment or earnings.