Offshoring, tasks, and the skill-wage pattern

Baumgarten, Daniel; Geishecker, Ingo und Görg, Holger (2013): Offshoring, tasks, and the skill-wage pattern. In: European Economic Review, Vol. 61: pp. 132-152

Abstract

The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the occupational task profile using rich individual-level panel data. Our main results suggest that, when only considering within-industry changes in offshoring, we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low-skilled workers, though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with sufficient precision. However, when allowing for cross-industry effects of offshoring, i.e. allowing for labor mobility across industries, negative wage effects of offshoring are quite substantial and depend strongly on the task profile of workers’ occupations. A higher degree of interactivity and, in particular, non-routine content effectively shields workers against the negative wage impact of offshoring.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Economics; Economics > Chairs > Junior Professor in International Trade
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• Language: English