Broad research sheds light on self-employed truckers’ autonomy, industry structure and regulatory impact

When the Department of Transportation mandated electronic logging devices (ELDs) across the U.S. trucking industry, the goal was clear: improve road safety by enforcing hours-of-service limits and reducing driver fatigue. But new research from the Broad College of Business shows that while the regulation succeeded in reducing violations, it also led to significant, and unintended, consequences for America’s self-employed truck drivers. As this study reveals, improving public safety can also reshape workers’ autonomy, income and the overall structure of an industry.

A team of researchers including Martin Holzhacker, associate professor in the Department of Accounting and Information Systems at the Broad College of Business; Harlow Loch, Broad Ph.D. alum; Jason Miller, Eli Broad Professor in Supply Chain Management; and Alex Scott, Gerald T. Niedert Professor and Cheryl Massingale Business Faculty Scholar at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, examined what happened when ELDs restricted how independent drivers could use their time and equipment.

Their study, “Property Rights Restrictions and Self-Employed Workers: Evidence from For-Hire Owner-Operators in U.S. Trucking,” published in the Production and Operations Management, a Financial Times Top 50 Journal, offers new insights into how regulation affects workers who own their assets, set their schedules and rely heavily on autonomy.

The ELD mandate provided a rare research opportunity.

Some for-hire owner-operators were required to adopt ELDs, while others, specifically those operating older trucks, were exempt. This created a natural experiment that allowed the team to compare the behavior of drivers with and without the new monitoring technology.

“We were able to observe what happens when a regulation changes how much control self-employed workers have over their time and their equipment,” Holzhacker explained. “It let us ask: What do people do differently when their autonomy becomes more restricted?”

The collaboration grew out of conversations among Broad faculty and doctoral students, drawing together accounting expertise on controls and governance with supply chain expertise on trucking and industry data.

The results revealed a story of trade-offs.

The intended effects worked:

• Hours-of-service violations dropped sharply among drivers subject to the ELD mandate.
• Violations fell despite becoming easier to detect, indicating strong compliance.

But independence declined:

• Regulated drivers spent less time on the road, reducing labor supply.
• Exit rates from the industry were 10–20% higher among affected owner-operators.
• Many who stayed became subcontractors for large carriers, giving up elements of independence for stability.

“Technology can reduce misconduct,” Holzhacker noted, “but it can also reshape an entire market. When economic control becomes restricted, even if legal ownership stays the same, the nature of the business changes.”

The authors argue that the trucking industry reflects broader questions facing today’s workforce.

Digital monitoring and platform-based management increasingly affect many different job roles, including independent contractors, gig-economy workers, delivery and ride-share drivers and self-employed professionals across industries.

This study shows that regulation designed to support safety and compliance must also consider downstream effects on autonomy, income stability and market structure.

“Policymakers need to understand both the benefits and the unintended consequences,” Holzhacker said. “And companies that work with self-employed contractors should recognize how these systems influence motivation, retention and performance.”

Building on this work, Holzhacker and his collaborators are pursuing new projects examining:

• how organizational hierarchies affect performance in corporations,
• how performance targets and internal reporting motivate employees in the retail industry, and
• how monitoring and measurement tools influence worker decisions across industries.

Holzhacker emphasized that doctoral students remain central to Broad’s research culture. “The fresh perspectives of Ph.D. studentsis tremendously valuable to these kinds of research projects,” he shared. “It’s incredibly rewarding to bring them into research that has real policy and industry implications.”