Alternative Measures of Offshorability: A Survey Approach

This paper reports on a pilot study of the use of conventional household survey methods to measure something unconventional: what we call offshorability, defined as the ability to perform one’s work duties (for the same employer and customers) from abroad. Notice that offshorability is a characteristic of a person’s job, not of the person himself. We see this research as important for two main reasons. First, one of us has argued previously that offshoring is potentially a very important labor market phenomenon in the United States and elsewhere, perhaps eventually amounting to a third Industrial Revolution. In the first Industrial Revolution, the share of the U.S. workforce engaged in agriculture declined by over 80 percentage points. In the second Industrial Revolution, which is still in progress, the share of American workers employed in manufacturing has declined by almost 25 percentage points so far, with most of the migration going to the service sector. The estimates presented here, like those of Blinder (2009b), suggest that the share of U.S. workers performing what Blinder (2006) called impersonal service jobs (defined precisely below) might shrink significantly while the share performing personal service jobs rises. Second, while readers must judge for themselves, we deem the pilot study to have been successful by several criteria that we will explain later. So we hope our survey methods will be replicated, improved upon, and eventually incorporated into some regular government survey, such as the Current Population Survey (CPS). Doing so would enable the U.S. government to track this important phenomenon over time.offshore, labor migration, employment trends

What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It?

Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents express a strong desire to be well informed on economic policy issues, and that television is their dominant source of information. On a variety of major policy issues (e.g., taxes, social security, health insurance), ideology is the most important determinant of public opinion, while measures of self-interest are the least important. Knowledge about the economy ranks somewhere in between.

What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It?

A long tradition in economic theory models economic policy decisions as solutions to optimization problems solved by rational and well-informed agents: A single policymaker minimizes a loss function subject to some constraints. Another body of literature models policy decisions as if they were made by well-informed voters in elections of some sort.

Coupled Cluster Treatment of the XY model

We study quantum spin systems in the 1D, 2D square and 3D cubic lattices with nearest-neighbour XY exchange. We use the coupled-cluster method (CCM) to calculate the ground-state energy, the T=0 sublattice magnetisation and the excited state energies, all as functions of the anisotropy parameter $\gamma$. We consider $S=1/2$ in detail and give some results for higher $S$. In 1D these results are compared with the exact $S=1/2$ results and in 2D with Monte-Carlo and series expansions. We obtain critical points close to the expected value $\gamma=0$ and our extrapolated LSUBn results for the ground-state energy are well converged for all $\gamma$ except very close to the critical point.Comment: 11 pages, Latex, 4 postscript figure, accepted by J.Phys.: Condens. Matte

Alternative Measures of Offshorability: A Survey Approach

This paper reports on a household survey specially designed to measure what we call the “offshorability” of jobs, defined as the ability to perform the work duties from abroad. We develop multiple measures of offshorability, using both self-reporting and professional coders. All the measures find that roughly 25% of U.S. jobs are offshorable. Our three preferred measures agree between 70% and 80% of the time. Furthermore, professional coders appear to provide the most accurate assessments, which is good news because the Census Bureau could collect data on offshorability without adding a single question to the CPS. Empirically, more educated workers appear to hold somewhat more offshorable jobs, and offshorability does not have systematic effects on either wages or the probability of layoff. Perhaps most surprisingly, routine work is no more offshorable than other work.

What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It?

macroeconomics, Public, Economic Policy