Measuring and Boosting the Productivity of Disabled Workers: The Case of Food-Delivery Workers in China" with Yanyou Chen, Huilan Xu, and Zhe Yuan

Abstract: 

What do firms gain from hiring disabled versus non-disabled workers, and how is this affected by new technology? We shed light on this by examining the relative performance of hearing-impaired workers using administrative data from one of China's largest food-delivery platforms. While disabled workers are slightly slower than non-disabled workers and have worse customer ratings, they supply many more hours and orders per week to the platform and are much less likely to quit, and they earn more profit for the platform. Leveraging a policy change, we assess the impact of an intelligent outbound call system designed to improve communication for hearing-impaired workers. The new technology significantly enhances disabled workers’ productivity, reduces negative customer reviews, and increases their work participation, thereby overturning most of the pre-technology gaps, and further enhancing the profitability of disabled workers. For gig work in China, a particular context but one covering many millions of workers, our results suggest that disabled workers face barriers but may still be quite valuable for firms, especially if disabled workers are supported with new information technology.