Drivers for ride-sharing companies, short-term renters, freelancers, and other one-off jobs are part of a growing market called the gig economy. The phenomenon is not new. It picked up steam in the early 2010s and carried it into the mid-2020s. Recently, researchers Spyros Lagaras, a professor of finance in Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joined researchers Matt Denes from Carnegie Mellon University and Margarita Toutsoura from Washington University in St. Louis to take a closer look at how common it is for those who start these gigs, use them as a pathway to entrepreneurship. Their findings, which confirmed their suspicion, were published in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Working Paper Series and the Journal of Financial Economics.