On the Negative Consequences of Low-Wage Offshoring for Innovation

Wulong Gu, Alla Lileeva and Daniel Trefler

No 35167, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that offshoring intermediates to China stimulates innovation. This is not entirely compelling. On the one hand, (a) offshoring lowers marginal costs and expands sales, thereby increasing the returns to innovation, especially for large firms. On the other hand, (b) offshoring low-quality intermediates reduces the costs of older-generation products, thereby reducing the returns to innovating into newer generations. We examine these two opposing forces over 2002-2011 for 6,024 Canadian firms. Our empirical strategy regresses measures of innovation, such as R&D, on imports of intermediate inputs. To address endogeneity, we construct a model-consistent shift-share instrument whose shocks are the often-dramatic improvements in the quality of HS6 Chinese intermediate inputs. We find that greater offshoring reduced R&D spending over 2002-2011 by 15% as (1) firms engaged in R&D in 2002 reduced their expenditures, and (2) firms not initially engaged in R&D were discouraged from starting up new R&D projects. Our model explains these findings: Rising quality of Chinese intermediates is a positive supply shock (rather than a negative China shock) that raises profits for all offshorers, raises innovation for the largest offshorers (channel a above), and lowers innovation for all other offshorers (channel b). These predictions are confirmed in the data.

JEL-codes: F1 F14 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
Note: ITI
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