Tag: sharing economy

Call for Papers: “Social Equality in the ‘Sharing Economy?’” Symposium (Indiana University, Bloomington)

iub700The Indiana University (IU) Maurer Law School’s Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality, in collaboration with IU’s Kelley School of Business and IU’s Ostrom Workshop, is hosting a symposium on the “gig” or “sharing” economy on February 13 and 14, 2020 at the Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana. The call for participation can be found here. The deadline for full consideration is November 27, 2019 at 5pm.

The Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality serves as an academic forum for scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and students to improve race and gender relations, foster new research in and across the disciplines, and provide an intellectual foundation for the pursuit of social justice.

The Kelley School of Business is consistently named among the top business schools in the world and is home to the Department of Business Law and Ethics, one of the largest and most well-respected departments of its kind. The Department continues Kelley’s strong business law tradition and advances research in a variety of business law fields, especially privacy, big data, and cybersecurity.

The Ostrom Workshop was founded at Indiana University in 1973 by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her husband, Vincent. Today, it carries forward their legacy by seeking and sharing solutions to the world’s most pressing problems involving communal and contested resources—from clean water to secure cyberspace.

IU Tax Policy Colloquium: Ring, “Silos and First Movers In the Sharing Economy Debates”

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Prof. Diane Ring

By: Leandra Lederman

On March 1, the Indiana University Maurer School of Law welcomed Surly’s own Prof. Diane Ring from Boston College Law School as the fourth speaker of the year in our Tax Policy Colloquium. Diane presented a new paper, which I believe is not yet publicly available, titled “Silos and First Movers In the Sharing Economy Debates.” This interesting paper focuses on the classification of workers in the “sharing” or “gig” economy as employees or independent contractors, arguing that “[t]wo interacting forces create the most serious risk for inadequate policy formulation: (1) silos among legal experts, and (2) first-mover effects.” (Page 1 of the draft.) The silo argument is that lawyers operate in subject areas that are isolated from each other, such that tax experts, for example, fail to perceive the effects of tax-related worker-classification rule changes on non-tax (such as employment) law, and vice versa. The first-mover argument is that the first actors on the worker-classification issue can wield outsized influence, shaping the debate in legal contexts other than the one directly affected.

The paper and presentation provide interesting insights into how giants of the service-worker sharing economy—not just Uber and Lyft, but also TaskRabbit—influence the development of the law on worker status. And subject-matter silos are a common complaint among legal academics. That issue has arisen in administrative law, for example, where there may be different rules developed in the context of different agencies. Courts and policymakers may struggle with tax exceptionalism (in the parlance of Kristin Hickman). But I wonder both if the legal silos in the gig economy are as strong as the paper suggests, and whether the effects the paper observes are first-mover effects or something else. Continue reading “IU Tax Policy Colloquium: Ring, “Silos and First Movers In the Sharing Economy Debates”” →