Offshoreability and wages. Evidence from German task data

Tobias Brändle () and Andreas Koch

Economia e Politica Industriale: Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, 2015, vol. 42, issue 2, 189-216

Abstract: We analyse the relationship between individuals’ wages and the potential relocation of their jobs, which we measure as a combination of a large number of job characteristics. Going beyond existing research, we distinguish between characteristics that are theoretically supposed to make a job more offshoreable, i.e. transferable across national borders, and characteristics that are assumed to make a job more easily outsourceable, i.e. transferable across a firm’s boundary. We find that wages are largely negatively influenced by these characteristics and that they are significantly lower especially for individuals with easily offshoreable jobs. Further differentiating these results, we also find differences between blue-collar and white-collar workers and between offshoreability in manufacturing and services. Methodologically, we show that a data-generated index can approximate an individual’s job’s offshoreability without the curse of dimensionality. Copyright Associazione Amici di Economia e Politica Industriale 2015

Keywords: Offshoring; Outsourcing; Trade in tasks; Wage level; F16; F61; F66; J24; J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s40812-014-0004-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:spr:epolin:v:42:y:2015:i:2:p:189-216

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40812

DOI: 10.1007/s40812-014-0004-z

Access Statistics for this article

Economia e Politica Industriale: Journal of Industrial and Business Economics is currently edited by C. Cambini, M.G. Colombo, L. Piscitello, L. Rondi and A. Zanfei

More articles in Economia e Politica Industriale: Journal of Industrial and Business Economics from Springer, Associazione Amici di Economia e Politica Industriale
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().