Driving toward freedom and precarity: assessing the impact of ride sharing apps on labor market outcomes in Brazil

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to the literature on the labor market impacts of Uber’s entry in Brazilian capital cities. The analysis first characterizes patterns of employment flows, earnings dynamics and shifts in the composition of self-employed drivers using descriptive statistics and transition analysis. Subsequently, it leverages the staggered rollout of Uber and 99 across cities using a difference-in-differences framework to estimate the causal effects of platform entry on labor market outcomes in Brazil. Design/methodology/approach Using microdata for 2012–2021 from Brazil’s Continuous National Household Sample Survey, a nationally representative, quarterly rotating labor-force survey, we combine (1) descriptive statistics, (2) year-to-year transition matrices and (3) a staggered difference-in-differences design that exploits the city-level timing of app entry to isolate causal effects on unemployment, overall employment, working hours, earnings and hourly earnings. Findings Platform entry triggered rapid growth of self-employed drivers, disproportionately Black and secondary-educated. Most entrants were already employed and remained driving, while a modest share of unemployed workers transitioned into the occupation, suggesting a buffer role. The difference-in-differences estimates reveal no statistically significant effect of Uber and 99’s market entry on city-level unemployment rates. Among self-employed drivers, employment counts increase in later periods, yet the initial earnings uptick proves transitory: average labor income and working hours decline over time, resulting in statistically unchanged hourly earnings. Research limitations/implications City-level samples limit statistical power, and the one-year panel may miss longer-term mobility. Future research could aim at investigating the impact on the formal labor market, trying to grasp how much the flexibility benefit of this type of occupation crowded out employment in a formal labor market context. Originality/value This study provides one of the first causal assessments of ride-sharing platforms’ labor-market impacts in Brazil and supplements it with detailed descriptive and transition analyses drawn from nationally representative survey microdata. It sheds light on how digital platforms reshape employment dynamics in economies with persistent informality.