Outsourcing Types, Relative Wages, and the Demand for Skilled Workers: New Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing.

Existing studies on the impact of outsourcing on relative wages and the demand for skilled workers mainly focus on aggregate outsourcing, in which imported intermediate inputs are used as a proxy. We depart from the existing studies by focusing on various types of outsourcing based on the six-digit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Economic Inquiry Vol. 47; no. 1; pp. 18 - 34
Main Authors: Chongvilaivan, Aekapol, Hur, Jung, Riyanto, Yohanes E.
Format: Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell January 2009
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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Summary:Existing studies on the impact of outsourcing on relative wages and the demand for skilled workers mainly focus on aggregate outsourcing, in which imported intermediate inputs are used as a proxy. We depart from the existing studies by focusing on various types of outsourcing based on the six-digit NAICS U.S. manufacturing data. We show that downstream materials and service outsourcing are skill biased, whereas upstream materials outsourcing is not. We also produce other supplementary results pertaining to the impact of technology, different capital inputs on relative wages, and the demand for skilled workers. (JEL C33, F14, F15) Reprinted by permission of the publisher.