Impact of the gig economy on crime: a case study of food delivery platforms

The gig economy has profoundly reshaped the labour market landscape, fostering new employment forms, expanding overall employment capacity, and enhancing income stability and economic resilience for a broad workforce, which mitigates gig workers’ vulnerability to economic shocks. This study empirically examines the gig economy’s impact on crime rates using a quasi-natural experiment of food delivery platforms’ staggered entry into 209 Chinese cities and criminal conviction data from judicial adjudicative documents. The findings demonstrate that the entry of food delivery platforms into cities – a typical gig economy representative – significantly reduces crime incidence, with robbery, snatch, and theft cases and offenders falling by 8.29% and 10.30%, respectively. This effect is more pronounced in cities with a higher floating population share and lower labour-force participation rates, and for individuals with prior criminal records. Mechanism analysis reveals the gig economy’s crime-reduction effect primarily operates through longer working hours, higher income, and alleviated emotional distress. This emphasizes the direct influence of gig work on improving workers’ economic conditions, and its profound contribution to enhancing quality of life and generating positive social benefits, which are hard to quantify using traditional economic indicators.