Ride-hail gross earnings before costs in Hall and Krueger

Jonathan V. Hall and Alan B. Krueger’s paper “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States,” published in the ILR Review in 2018, is one of the most cited descriptive accounts of ride-hail labour supply in the mid-2010s. Hall was then head of economic research at Uber; Krueger was an academic labour economist. The affiliation is material to how the paper is read: it combines company administrative data with survey responses, and it is open about that partnership.

The study describes who drove, how many hours they worked, how flexible those hours were, and what drivers earned on a gross hourly basis before vehicle costs, fuel and related expenses. Among the headline descriptive results, driver-partners often worked part-time schedules, valued the ability to choose hours, and reported gross hourly earnings that, in the markets and period studied, compared favourably with some local taxi benchmarks on the measures the authors construct. Utilization — the share of online time spent with a passenger — is reported as a separate operational statistic, not as a wage.

That separation matters for online monetization research. A gross hourly earnings figure that does not subtract costs is not take-home pay. A utilization rate is not an earnings rate. Hall and Krueger discuss costs as a distinct issue; later work has pressed harder on net earnings after expenses and on how those nets vary by city, period and driving intensity. Those debates do not erase the descriptive value of the original paper, but they limit how far its gross figures can travel.

Hours definitions also travel with the figure. Whether an “hour” means time online, time with a passenger, or time that includes waiting and repositioning changes the denominator. The paper’s contribution is to make those categories visible rather than to settle every dispute about preferred definitions.

Design limits that travel with the figures

The data cover Uber driver-partners in the United States in a specific growth period for the platform. Markets outside the US, later regulatory regimes, and competing ride-hail apps are outside the sample. Survey response patterns and selection of who remains active can shape averages. The paper is a labour-market description of one firm’s partners, not a randomised evaluation of ride-hail as a category of work, and not a forecast of earnings conditions in a later decade.

Critical readings often focus on three points: access to company data, the treatment of costs, and the risk that early-period earnings conditions do not persist. None requires discarding the paper. They require keeping the published definition of each figure attached to the figure — the rule this clock applies to every note.

Compared with microtask scrapes such as Hara et al. on Mechanical Turk, Hall and Krueger measure a different labour process: passenger transport with vehicle capital, city-level demand, and an app-mediated matching market. Compared with vacancy indices such as the Online Labour Index, they measure realised hours and earnings for drivers already on the platform, not the flow of new job posts. Placing the three side by side shows how “side income on the internet” fragments into distinct empirical objects once the measurement design is named.

Another reading risk is to treat part-time flexibility and earnings figures as a single claim about wellbeing. The paper reports labour-supply patterns and earnings measures; it does not settle debates about insurance, occupational safety, or long-run career trajectories. Citing Hall and Krueger for what they measured — who drove, for how long, at what gross hourly rate, with what utilization — keeps the note inside the evidence the authors published.

City composition is a further boundary. National averages can hide large differences between dense markets with short wait times and thinner markets where unpaid waiting stretches. Where a summary cites a single national figure, city variation still belongs beside it.

The durable contribution of Hall and Krueger is category clarity: who counts as a driver-partner, what counts as an hour online, what is reported as gross earnings, and what remains outside the earnings column. Later papers that revise the net picture after costs are complementary; they are not a reason to blur those categories in the original description.