Abstract. This paper reviews the empirical literature on the effects of offshoring and foreign activities of multinational enterprises on developed countries' labour markets. Results suggest that material offshoring worsens wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers; it also seems to make employment more volatile, by raising the elasticity of labour demand and the risk of job losses. Service offshoring exerts at most small negative effects on total employment, and changes the composition of the workforce in favour of high-skilled whitecollar employees. Multinationals tend to substitute domestic and foreign labour in response to changes in relative wages across countries; substitutability is weak, however, and mainly driven by horizontal, market-seeking foreign direct investments.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may SERVICE OFFSHORING AND WHITE-COLLAR EMPLOYMENT AbstractI study the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, using highly disaggregated occupational data for the U.S.. I present a structural model of the firm's behavior that allows tractable derivation of labor demand elasticities for highly detailed occupations. I estimate the model using Quasi-Maximum Likelihood, to simultaneously account for the high degree of censoring of the employment variable and the small crosssectional dimension of the panel. I find that service offshoring is skill-biased, because it raises employment among high-skilled occupations and lowers employment among medium-and low-skilled ones. Within each skill group, service offshoring penalizes tradeable occupations and tends to benefit complex non tradeable jobs.JEL Code: F16, J23, C34.

We study how new imported inputs a¤ect the introduction of new domestic products. To this purpose, we assemble a novel data set covering 25 EU countries over 1995-2007 and containing information on domestic production and bilateral trade for the universe of products. We develop a procedure to identify new domestic goods and new imported inputs, while dealing with the complications raised by the yearly changes in the commodity classi…cations. Using this novel data, we …rst corroborate Goldberg et al.'s (2010a) …nding that new imported inputs have a large positive e¤ect on the introduction of new goods. Then, we move a step ahead and investigate the mechanisms behind this e¤ect. To this purpose, we construct novel estimates of quality for all input varieties imported by each country. We …nd the e¤ect of new imported inputs to be increasing in their quality and decreasing in their price, conditional on quality. Finally, we provide novel evidence on the characteristics of new goods. In particular, we show that new products are upgraded, as they sell at higher prices and possess higher quality than existing goods. Overall, our results suggest that new imported inputs foster the introduction of new and better products, by enabling countries to access cheaper or higher-quality intermediates from abroad.JEL codes: F1.

use the same dataset to investigate, respectively, the impact of firms' innovation strategies on the growth of TFP, the relationship between financial development and innovation, and the relationship between financial constraints and firm size distribution. Moreover, using older releases of our dataset, Castellani (2002) shows evidence that exporters are generally more productive than non-exporters and that productivity increases after exporting (learning-by-exporting).[ 1206 ] 4 As for trade and quality consumption see, in particular, Bils and Klenow (

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may SERVICE OFFSHORING AND WHITE-COLLAR EMPLOYMENT AbstractI study the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, using highly disaggregated occupational data for the U.S.. I present a structural model of the firm's behavior that allows tractable derivation of labor demand elasticities for highly detailed occupations. I estimate the model using Quasi-Maximum Likelihood, to simultaneously account for the high degree of censoring of the employment variable and the small crosssectional dimension of the panel. I find that service offshoring is skill-biased, because it raises employment among high-skilled occupations and lowers employment among medium-and low-skilled ones. Within each skill group, service offshoring penalizes tradeable occupations and tends to benefit complex non tradeable jobs.JEL Code: F16, J23, C34.

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This article studies the effects of service offshoring on the skill composition of labour demand, using novel comparable data for nine Western European countries between 1990 and 2004. The results show that service offshoring raises the relative demand for high-and medium-skilled workers. Its effects are qualitatively identical, and quantitatively similar, to those of material offshoring. Additional evidence suggests, however, that the two types of offshoring may work through different channels: complementarity between imported services and domestic skills in the case of service offshoring, substitution of low-skilled labour in the case of material offshoring. Overall, the effects are not large in economic terms.