Service Offshoring and White-Collar Employment

Abstract

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.

Offshoring and Labor Markets

“…49 One challenge in using the O*NET data is that any given occupation is described using a long list of characteristics that become unwieldy in a regression setting, largely due to collinearity. Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) Comparing Criscuolo and Garicano (2010), OPW 2013, and Crino (2010, we note that they report mixed results for how offshoring affects employment levels. OPW 2013 find no effect, Criscuolo and Garicano (2010) report positive effects, while Crino (2010) finds positive effects for some occupations but negative effects for the others.…”

Employment effects of service offshoring: Evidence from matched firms

“…The common support restriction is implemented by deleting the o¤shoring …rms whose propensity score is higher than the maximum or lower than the minimum propensity score of the matched non-o¤shoring …rms. 4 Covariate balancing tests reported in the web appendix 5 show that the matching is e¤ec-tive in removing di¤erences in observable characteristics between o¤shoring and non-o¤shoring 4 Estimation and testing are performed in Stata 10, using the psmatch2 and pscore routines developed by Leuven and Sianesi (2003). 5 Available at http://crino.iae-csic.org.…”

“…The potential consequences of this new phenomenon for the level and skill composition of domestic employment have been extensively debated in the media (see Mankiw and Swagel, 2006, for a summary) and have become the object of a rapidly growing number of empirical studies (see Crinò, 2009a, for a review). So far, the literature suggests that service o¤shoring has small e¤ects on the level of domestic employment (see, e.g., Amiti and Wei, 2005; and Liu and Tre ‡er, 2008) but changes its composition in favor of high skilled workers (see, e.g., Geishecker and Görg, 2008;and Crinò, 2009b). Such e¤ects re ‡ect the fact that the developed countries o¤shore low skill-intensive services and specialize in more complex tasks, so that low skilled jobs are replaced by high skilled jobs with little change in total employment.…”

The effects at home of initiating production abroad: evidence from matched French firms

“…While these results are useful to clarify the orders of magnitude at stake, questions remain about the nature of the relationship between offshoring and labour demand. Focusing on the structure of labour demand, Crinò (2010) shows that offshoring increases employment in more skilled occupations, with potentially significant impact across labour categories. While anxiety surrounding services offshoring sometimes appear to have been exaggerated, the conclusions to be drawn from the existing literature remain contentious.…”