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 disabl ed versus non-disabled workers, and how is this affected by new technology? We shed light on this by examining the relative performance of hearing-imp aired workers using administrative data from one of China's largest food-de livery platforms. While disabled workers are slightly slower than non-disab led workers and have worse customer ratings, they supply many more hours an d orders per week to the platform and are much less likely to quit, and the y earn more profit for the platform. Leveraging a policy change, we assess the impact of an intelligent outbound call system designed to improve commu nication for hearing-impaired workers. The new technology significantly enh ances disabled workers’ productivity, reduces negative customer reviews, an d increases their work participation, thereby overturning most of the pre-t echnology gaps, and further enhancing the profitability of disabled workers . For gig work in China, a particular context but one covering many million s of workers, our results suggest that disabled workers face barriers but m ay still be quite valuable for firms, especially if disabled workers are su pported with new information technology.
DTSTAMP:20260418T124821Z DTSTART:20250327T163000Z DTEND:20250327T180000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR