The impact of international outsourcing on individual employment security: a micro level analysis

The paper analyzes how international outsourcing affected individual employment security. The analysis is carried out at the micro-level, combining monthly spell data from household panel data and industry-level outsourcing measures. By utilizing micro-level data, problems such as aggregation and potential endogeneity bias, as b well as crude skill approximations that regularly hamper industry level displacement studies, can be reduced considerably. The main finding is that international outsourcing significantly lowers individual employment security. Interestingly, the effect does, however, not differ between high-, medium-, and low-skilled workers but only varies with job duration. --outsourcing,displacement,duration analysis,mass points

Perceived Job Insecurity and Well-Being Revisited: Towards Conceptual Clarity

This paper analyzes the impact of job insecurity perceptions on individual well-being. In contrast to previous studies, we explicitly take into account perceptions about both the likelihood and the potential costs of job loss and demonstrate that most contributions to the literature suffer from simultaneity bias. When accounting for simultaneity, we find the true unbiased effect of perceived job insecurity to be more than twice the size of naive estimates. Accordingly, perceived job insecurity ranks as one of the most important factors in employees' well-being and can be even more harmful than actual job loss with subsequent unemployment.job security, life satisfaction, unemployment

Services Offshoring and Wages: Evidence from Micro Data

This paper investigates the effects of services offshoring on wages using individual level data combined with industry information on offshoring. Our results show that services offshoring affects the real wage of low and medium skilled individuals negatively. By contrast, skilled workers benefit from services offshoring in terms of higher real wages. Hence, offshoring has contributed to a widening of the wage gap between skilled and less skilled workers. This result is obtained while controlling for individual and sectoral observed and unobserved heterogeneity. In particular, our empirical model also controls for the impact of technological change and offshoring of materials.services offshoring, individual wages

What Drives Trade-related R&D Spillovers? Decomposing Knowledge- diffusing Trade Flows

Our paper decomposes knowledge-diffusing trade flows and estimates their impacts separately. Overall, trade generates positive knowledge spillovers, but the effects of intra-industry trade are ambiguous. With regard to sectoral import penetration, we find that potential positive spillovers are dominated by negative competition effects. This, however, masks the significant positive spillover effects of intra-industry trade that corresponds to international outsourcing.R&D, trade, productivity, spillovers, competition

Services Offshoring and Wages: Evidence from Micro Data

This paper investigates the effects of services offshoring on wages using individual level data combined with industry information on offshoring. Our results show that services offshoring affects the real wage of low and medium skilled individuals negatively. By contrast, skilled workers benefit from services offshoring in terms of higher real wages. Hence, offshoring has contributed to a widening of the wage gap between skilled and less skilled workers. This result is obtained while controlling for individual and sectoral observed and unobserved heterogeneity. In particular, our empirical model also controls for the impact of technological change and offshoring of materials.services offshoring, individual wages

Do Labour Market Institutions Matter? Micro-level Wage Effects of International Outsourcing in Three European Countries

This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages in three European countries with markedly different labour market institutions: Germany, the UK and Denmark. To do so we use individual level data sets for the three countries and construct comparable measures of outsourcing at the industry level, distinguishing outsourcing by broad region. Estimating the same specification on different data show that there are some interesting differences in the effect of outsourcing across countries. We discuss some possible reasons for these differences based on labour market institutions.international outsourcing; individual wages; labour market institutions

The impact of international outsourcing on individual employment security: a micro level analysis

The paper analyzes how international outsourcing affected individual employment security. The analysis is carried out at the micro-level, combining monthly spell data from household panel data and industry-level outsourcing measures. By utilizing micro-level data, problems such as aggregation and potential endogeneity bias, as b well as crude skill approximations that regularly hamper industry level displacement studies, can be reduced considerably. The main finding is that international outsourcing significantly lowers individual employment security. Interestingly, the effect does, however, not differ between high-, medium-, and low-skilled workers but only varies with job duration

Productivity spillovers through vertical linkages: Evidence from 17 OECD countries

This paper extends the literature on productivity spillovers from inward FDI. We use comparable industry level data for 17 OECD countries and investigate the importance of horizontal and vertical spillovers, and differences between CEEC and other OECD countries. Results show that there is evidence for spillovers through vertical backward linkages between multinationals and domestic firms for all countries, but that this effect is much higher for CEEC than other OECD countries. We also find some evidence for positive effects from horizontal FDI, but these do not differ between the two country groups.Foreign direct investment, productivity, vertical linkages, spillovers

Offshoring, Tasks, and the Skill-Wage Pattern

The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the ease with which individuals' tasks can be offshored. Our analysis relates to recent theoretical contributions arguing that there is only a loose relationship between the suitability of a task for offshoring and the associated skill level. Accordingly, wage effects of offshoring can be very heterogeneous within skill groups. We test this hypothesis by combining micro-level information on wages and demographic and workplace characteristics as well as occupational information relating to the degree of offshorability with industry-level data on offshoring. Our main results suggest that in partial equilibrium, wage effects of offshoring are fairly modest but far from homogeneous and depend significantly on the extent to which the respective task requires personal interaction or can be described as non-routine. When allowing for cross-industry movement of workers, i.e., looking at a situation closer to general equilibrium, the magnitude of the wage effects of offshoring becomes substantial. Low- and medium-skilled workers experience significant wage cuts due to offshoring which, however, again strongly depend on the degree of personal interaction and non-routine content.outsourcing, offshoring, tasks, skills, wages

Returns to Open Source Software Engagement: An Empirical Test of the Signaling Hypothesis

Job-Market signaling is ranked high among the explanations why in- dividuals engage voluntarily in OSS projects. If true, signaling implies the existence of a wage premium for OSS engagement. However, due to a lack of data this issue has not been tested previously. Based on a novel data set comprising detailed demographic and wage information for some 7,000 German IT employees, this paper fills this gap. In the empirical analysis, however, we find no support for the signaling hypoth- esis, a result that is robust to different measures of OSS involvement and different model specifications.open source software, signaling, wage differentials