Enrichetta Giurickovic (Paris School of Economics)
The rapid expansion of freelance workers across a wide range of tasks raises new questions about how firms adapt to increasingly flexible forms of work. Yet, the absence of data linking self-employed workers (SE) to client firms has made it difficult to assess the firm-level consequences of this structural labor market change. This paper addresses a central question: do freelancers substitute for salaried employees? Leveraging a policy change in France as a quasi-natural experiment, I apply a shift-share design combined with task-based SE activity-occupation mapping to estimate the impact of exogenous shifts in SE labor supply on salaried labor. I find that SE expansion reduces firms’ reliance on traditional employment, primarily by displacing fixed-term contracts. In the long run, a doubling in the availability of freelancers employable in relevant tasks leads to an average 30% decline in temporary jobs, while permanent employment—which is unaffected in the short term—increases by approximately 5%. These results suggest that firms rely on SE workers to gain flexibility and reduce labor costs, while complementing stable roles—reshaping the composition of modern labor demand and raising new questions for employment protection systems.