Offshoring and Occupational Specificity of Human Capital

Moritz Ritter

No 1207, DETU Working Papers from Department of Economics, Temple University

Abstract: I document that workers in newly tradable service occupations possess more occupation-specific human capital and are more highly educated than workers in previously tradable occupations. Motivated by this observation, I develop a dynamic equilibrium model with labor market frictions and specific human capital to study the labor adjustment process after a trade shock. When calibrated to match the increase in U.S. trade between 1990 and 2010, the model suggests that (1) output increases immediately after a trade shock and converges quickly to the steady state; (2) labor market institutions play a larger role in the adjustment process than specific human capital; (3) the short run distributional effects are small if the labor market is flexible, even in the presence of specific human capital.

Keywords: Offshoring; Sectoral Labor Reallocation; Human Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 F16 J24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-hrm, nep-int, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cla.temple.edu/RePEc/documents/DETU_12_07.pdf First Version, 2012 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Offshoring and occupational specificity of human capital (2014)
Working Paper: Offshoring and Occupational Specificity of Human Capital (2009)
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:tem:wpaper:1207

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DETU Working Papers from Department of Economics, Temple University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dimitrios Diamantaras ().