We analyze the relationship between offshoring and the onshore workforce composition in German multinational enterprises (MNEs), using plant data that allow us to discern tasks, occupations, and workforce skills. Offshoring is associated with a statistically significant shift towards more non-routine and more interactive tasks, and with a shift towards highly educated workers. The shift towards highly educated workers is in excess of what is implied by changes in either the task or the occupational composition. Offshoring to low-income countries—with the exception of Central and Eastern European countries—is associated with stronger onshore responses. We find offshoring to predict between 10 and 15 percent of observed changes in wage-bill shares of highly educated workers and measures of non-routine and interactive tasks.

For centuries, most international trade involved an exchange of complete goods. But, with recent improvements in transportation and communications technology, it increas-ingly entails di¤erent countries adding value to global supply chains, or what might be called trade in tasks.We propose a theory of the global production process that focuses on tradable tasks and use it to study how falling costs of o¤shoring a¤ect factor prices in the source country. We identify a productivity e¤ect of task trade that bene…ts the factor whose tasks are more easily moved o¤shore. In the light of this e¤ect, reductions in the cost of trading tasks can generate shared gains for all domestic factors, in contrast to the distributional conict that typically results from reductions in the cost of trading goods.

We show that in a Ricardo-Viner-type trade model with unemployment due to search and matching the productivity effect of offshoring emphasized by Grossman & Rossi-Hansberg (2008) emerges as a vehicle of job creation. Improvements in the technology of offshoring causes job losses at the extensive margin where ever more tasks are performed abroad, but it also causes job creation from cost-savings associated with enhanced trade in tasks. We identify conditions under which job creation dominates job destruction. We also show that employment may follow a non-monotonic pattern of adjustment to successive improvements in the technology of offshoring. We thank the participants of the Brown Bag Seminar at Tübingen University as well as the seminar participants of the THE X-mas Workshop at Hohenheim University, and the 12th International Economic Relations Workshop at Göttingen University. We thank especially Udo Kreickemeier and Hartmut Egger for helpful comments and discussion. We have also benefited from a stimulating discussion by Hans-Jörg Schmerer at the THE X-mas Workshop. This is a preliminary version please

Recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate steps which can be ranked according to the cost savings from producing abroad. We replace this assumption by the notion of a technologically determined sequence of production steps. In our model, cost savings from offshoring fluctu-ate along the production chain, and moving unfinished goods across borders causes transport costs. We show that, in such a setting, firms may refrain from offshoring even if relocating individual steps would be advantageous in terms of offshoring costs, or they may offshore (almost) the entire production chain to save transport costs. Small variations in model parameters may have a substantial impact on off-shoring activities.

We analyze the relationship between offshoring and the onshore workforce composition in German multinational enterprises (MNEs), using plant data that allow us to discern tasks, occupations, and workforce skills. Offshoring is associated with a statistically significant shift towards more non-routine and more interactive tasks, and with a shift towards highly educated workers. Moreover, the shift towards highly educated workers is in excess of what is implied by changes in either the task or the occupational composition. Whether offshored activities are located in low-income or high-income countries does not alter the direction of the relationship. We find offshoring to predict between 10 and 15 percent of observed changes in wage-bill shares of highly educated workers and measures of non-routine and interactive tasks.

An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the RePEc website: www.RePEc.org • from the CESifo website: Twww.CESifo-group.org/wp T

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We investigate the impact of international outsourcing on productivity using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. Specifically, we distinguish the effect of outsourcing of materials from services inputs. Moreover, we examine whether the impact on productivity is different for plants being more embedded in international markets through exporting or being part of a multinational. Our results demonstrate that these distinctions can in general be important and are line with implications from the recent theoretical literature.

Die ZBW räumt Ihnen als Nutzerin/Nutzer das unentgeltliche, räumlich unbeschränkte und zeitlich auf die Dauer des Schutzrechts beschränkte einfache Recht ein, das ausgewählte Werk im Rahmen der unter

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