EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Offshoring Jobs? Multinationals and US Manufacturing Employment

Ann Harrison and Margaret McMillan

No 741, Discussion Papers Series, Department of Economics, Tufts University from Department of Economics, Tufts University

Abstract: Critics of globalization claim that US manufacturing firms are being driven to shift employment abroad by the prospects of cheaper labor. Others argue that the availability of low-wage labor has allowed US-based firms to survive and even prosper. Yet evidence for either hypothesis, beyond anecdotes, is slim. Using firm-level data collected by the US Bureau of Economics Analysis (BEA), we estimate the impact on US manufacturing employment of changes in foreign affiliate wages, controlling for changing demand conditions and technological change. We show that the motive for offshoring and consequently the location of offshore activity significantly affects the impact of offshoring on parent employment. However, for firms which do significantly different tasks at home and abroad, foreign and domestic employment are complements. These offsetting effects may be combined to show that offshoring is associated with a quantitatively small decline in manufacturing employment. These results are robust to a variety of estimation techniques and robustness tests.

Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ase.tufts.edu/econ/research/documents/2009/mcMillanOffshoringJobs.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: OFFSHORING JOBS? MULTINATIONALS AND U.S. MANUFACTURING EMPLOYMENT (2022) Downloads
Journal Article: Offshoring Jobs? Multinationals and U.S. Manufacturing Employment (2011) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tuf:tuftec:0741

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers Series, Department of Economics, Tufts University from Department of Economics, Tufts University Medford, MA 02155, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marcus Weir ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:tuf:tuftec:0741