Whose Job Goes Abroad? International Outsourcing and Individual Job Separations

This paper focuses on the adjustment costs of globalisation by studying the effects of international outsourcing on individual transitions out of jobs in the Danish manufacturing sector for the period 1990–2003. A competing risks duration model that distinguishes between job‐to‐job and job‐to‐unemployment transitions is estimated. Outsourcing is found to increase the unemployment risk of low‐skilled workers, but the quantitative impact is modest. Outsourcing is also found to reduce the job change hazard rate for all education groups. Thus, the paper provides evidence for small adjustment costs of globalisation.     

Where to go? Workers' reasons to quit and intra- vs. interindustry job mobility

We show that workers' reasons for quitting their job affect their decision to stay in or leave their industry, using survey data among public sector employees in the Netherlands. Workers quitting for e.g. pay, work pressure, or job duties move relatively often to another industry, in contrast to workers quitting for commuting time or the atmosphere at work. This suggests that workers use their experience in the initial job to update their expectations on other jobs in the industry, as the first set of job aspects is more likely to be related among jobs within an industry than the latter. Furthermore, it is shown that workers' reasons to quit fully explain the differences in wage growth between intra- and interindustry job movers. Lastly, we find that workers who quit for pay or management often leave the public sector altogether.     

DO STATE EMPLOYMENT ELIGIBILITY VERIFICATION LAWS AFFECT JOB TURNOVER?

State laws requiring employers to verify workers' employment eligibility may reduce employment and earnings among unauthorized workers and make it difficult for them to switch jobs. Using data from the 2005–2014 Quarterly Workforce Indicators, we find evidence of a reduction in employment and job turnover among Hispanics as a whole in states that require all employers to verify employment eligibility. These adverse effects become larger as the share of likely unauthorized Hispanic workers falls. The drop in job turnover may be due to the laws trapping some Hispanic workers in their jobs. There is little effect on employment or job turnover among non‐Hispanic whites or blacks. There is no effect on average pay for all groups of workers. (JEL J15, J61, J68)     

Idiosyncratic risk and aggregate employment dynamics

This paper studies how idiosyncratic productivity risk impacts aggregate employment dynamics when there is a trade-off between workers' productivity and costs of job creation and destruction. In our analysis, increasing idiosyncratic risk induces a producer to move workers out of structured jobs that are costly to create and destroy and towards less productive but more flexible unstructured positions. This substitution leaves the producer's total employment more responsive to both idiosyncratic and aggregate disturbances. If all of an industry's producers respond to heightened idiosyncratic risk in this way, then industry-wide employment can respond more to a given aggregate shock. We apply this insight to connect differences between young and old manufacturing plants' aggregate employment dynamics with their corresponding differences in idiosyncratic variability.     

Job Security,Financial Security and Worker Well‐being: New Evidence on the Effects of Flexible Employment

This paper uses panel data drawn from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to provide new evidence of the links between unemployment, wages, job security, financial security and workers' well‐being for workers in flexible employment. Our findings indicate that workers in flexible employment encounter more unemployment and experience increased job insecurity; unemployment is associated with wage penalties. Lower wages, job insecurity and financial insecurity affect well‐being. However, these negative outcomes are mitigated by longer job tenure. Our results have implications for moves towards a flexicurity model of employment     

An equilibrium search model with optimal wage-experience contracts

The objective of this paper is to study equilibrium in a labour market, in which workers search on the job and firms offer wage contracts conditional upon workers' experience and employment status. In this environment, the optimal contract can be described by a promotion contract. The distribution of contract offers is dispersed within and across experience levels. As workers stay longer in the market and promotion dates get closer, the option value of holding a job increases. Firms offer early promotions to attract more experienced workers. A positive relation between experience and earnings can arise purely from firms' optimal response to labour market competition brought about by workers' on-the-job search. We characterise the offer distribution for each experience level and show how these change with labour market conditions.     

The impact of material and service outsourcing on employment in Thailand's manufacturing industries

With increasing emphasis on the importance of outsourcing, the ‘fear of job losses’ has been of significant interest, not only in the developed countries, but also in the developing countries. In this article, we empirically investigate the impacts of intermediate inputs (material) and services outsourcing on the relative demands for skilled and unskilled labour in Thailand's manufacturing sectors from 1999 to 2003. Based on the aggregation of establishment-level data at 4-digit industrial classification, we find that both intermediate inputs and service outsourcing are relatively skill-biased. Further, our results show that intermediate inputs outsourcing has negative impacts on the relative demands for skilled and unskilled workers, whereas service outsourcing shifts the demand towards skilled workers at the expense of unskilled workers.     

DIRECTED SEARCH ON THE JOB AND THE WAGE LADDER*

We model a labor market where employed workers search on the job and firms direct workers' search using wage offers and employment probabilities. Applicants observe all offers and face a trade‐off between wage and employment probability. There is wage dispersion among workers, even though all workers and jobs are homogeneous. Equilibrium wages form a ladder, as workers optimally choose to climb the ladder one rung at a time. This is because low‐wage applicants are relatively more sensitive to employment probability than to wage and thus forgo the opportunity to apply for a high wage, with a lower chance of success.     

Outsourcing and the Heckscher–Ohlin Model

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate the currently mushrooming phenomenon of outsourcing into the standard two‐sector, two‐factor Heckscher–Ohlin model of international trade. We first show how outsourcing modifies a firm's production function, and then demonstrate that outsourcing generally raises the return to capital and lowers the real wage, although the nation's GDP rises in proportion to the value‐added in the outsourcing industry. Furthermore, the output of the outsourcing sector may actually fall even though its unit cost goes down; the output of the other sector then rises. By contrast, employment in the outsourcing sector may actually rise.     

Trade Competitiveness and Employment: Job Creation or Job Destruction

This paper empirically examines the impact of fluctuations in international trade competitiveness on employment in the UK manufacturing sector over the period 1999–2010. We find statistically significant but economically small effects of a shock to international trade competitiveness on the level of employment. Our results show that the adjustment process in employment mainly works through job creation. We also find that compared to large firms, small firms contribute more toward job creation than job destruction. Our results that changes in GDP growth rate and average wages are significantly related to employment suggest that the UK labour market significantly responds to market forces. Finally, we find that the effect of changes in the real exchange rate on both job creation and job destruction differs between exporting and non-exporting firms.     

International trade,job training,and labor reallocation

A large literature studies the impact of increased import competition on workers' outcomes, however, relatively few studies examine which policies can aid workers displaced by trade. In this article, we evaluate the impact of an industrial job training program in Brazil on workers displaced from manufacturing sectors. We find that industrial training increases the probability of re-entry into the formal labor market 1 year after displacement by about 17 percentage points and is even more effective for workers displaced from sectors exposed to high import competition. This effect is mainly associated with workers switching sectors and occupations after training.     

Manufacturing growth and local employment multipliers in China

We study the impact of employment growth in manufacturing on job creation in the non-tradable sector for prefecture-level cities in China. Using the 2000 and 2010 Censuses of Population, we apply the shift-share approach to isolate the exogenous change of employment growth in manufacturing. For every hundred new manufacturing jobs, we find that 34 additional jobs are created in the non-tradable sector. We also show that the effect is heterogeneous along a number of dimensions. More specifically, one new job in high-technology manufacturing creates more jobs in the non-tradable sector while low-technology manufacturing employment growth has no significant multiplier effect. Among the non-tradable industries, the multiplier is the largest for wholesale, retail, and catering. Finally, the effect is also geographically heterogeneous, with the multiplier being greater for inland regions.     

The impact of production offshoring on the skill composition of manufacturing firms: evidence from Italy

In this work we explore how the international outsourcing of production impacts the skill composition of employment within Italian manufacturing firms. In particular, our aim is to assess whether the choice to offshore production activities to cheap‐labour countries implies a bias in the employment of skilled workers relative to unskilled ones.

Using a balanced panel of firms covering the period 1995–2003, we set up a counterfactual analysis in which, by using a difference‐in‐differences propensity score matching estimator, we compare the dynamics of skill demand for treated and control firms while addressing the possible problem of selection bias.

Our results identify a ‘potential’ skill bias effect of production offshoring. In particular, we find that treated firms tend to show an upward shift in the skill ratio with respect to the counterfactual sample, but coefficients are not significantly different from zero. When we look at the elements of the skill ratio separately, we find that the skill bias is driven by a fall in the employment of production workers (blue collars), rather than by the increase in the employment of non‐production workers (white collars), thus providing further evidence on the unskilled labour‐saving nature of international outsourcing.     

AN EQUILIBRIUM SEARCH MODEL WHEN FIRMS OBSERVE WORKERS' EMPLOYMENT STATUS*

This article considers an equilibrium search model, where firms post wages using information on workers' employment status. Earnings differentials between workers of different employment statuses are driven by firms' ability to discriminate workers' reservation wages. I study how these wage policies depend on firms' and workers' characteristics, and how these policies affect the wage distribution. The model delivers new predictions for the amount of wage dispersion that can be generated with search models and provides a better representation of the left tail of the wage distribution in the presence of a legal minimum wage than standard equilibrium search models.     

外包与生产率:基于工业行业数据的经验研究

本文使用投入产出表的数据计算了我国35个工业行业的外包比率,并以面板数据模型检验了外包对全员劳动生产率的影响;为验证其中的机理,进一步检验了外包对就业以及产出的影响。检验结果表明,当企业把原本自制的但属于其它产业的中间投入品外包出去,将会提高企业的劳动生产率。原因是,外包产生了资本节约型的技术进步;外包在提高劳动生产率的同时,对就业并没有产生负面影响,原因是规模效应抵消了替代效应。正因为这两点,外包对产出的影响可以概括为两个方面:一是促进生产可能性前沿向外移动,是生产边界的推动器;二是导致生产结构从劳动密集型向资本密集型转变,是产品结构升级的转换器。     

Realitic and Analytic Syntheses of Macro- and Microeconomics

We study the impact of employer's opportunism on wage rigidity in capitalist companies by arguing that the need to fix wages is crucially influenced by the asymmetric distribution of decision-making power and information in favor of the stronger contractual party — the employer, and against the weaker contractual party — employees. The capitalist entrepreneur can make decisions, whose negative consequences are borne by workers in terms of lower wages and more intense work pace. Excessive wage reductions in the face of negative exogenous shocks or too risky investment decisions represent the main instances of such opportunistic behavior. Fixed wages can represent workers' best response to the emerging risk of the employer moral hazard, but this implies a heightened risk of layoffs since wages and employment levels cannot be fixed at the same time. Besides discussing piece rate contracts, profit-sharing and codetermination as counterexamples, we observe worker cooperatives which depart from the presence of contrasting interests and private information in the principal-agent framework. Indeed, several empirical studies have shown greater employment stability and wage flexibility in worker cooperatives vis-à-vis the capitalist firm.     

WORKERS'CO-OPERATION

The first draft of this paper was put forward for consideration within the Labour Movement in April 1975 and was amended as a result of subsequent discussion. The paper examines the present movement for workers' co-operation in the light of the historical development of producers' co-operation in Britain. It concludes that the relative failure of producers' co-operation in the past has been due to the unfavourable economic environment in which it has tried to function – and that as a result it has been unable to compete with aggressive entrepreneurial capitalism in the accumulation of capital. Producers' co-operation has already demonstrated undoubted advantages. It is potentially more efficient in the use of labour and less socially divisive; it provides a model for the future transformation of industry in which workers can play a full part as equal partners rather than hired hands; it may also assist in maintaining existing, and creating new employment. In the present changed circumstances in which the free market economy is breaking down under accelerating inflation and major firms are turning to the government to solve their liquidity problems, it is suggested that workers' co-operation has an important part to play in the regeneration of British industry and that it should be encouraged as a matter of public policy. There are two major requirements for the growth of the producers' co-operative sector: 1. There must be a demand for, and ideological commitment to workers' co-operation on the shop floor. While this can be helped by government action it must develop primarily by the self-education of workers through their trade unions. 2. The state must create a climate favourable to workers' co-operation in the economy by the provision of capital, advice and specialist educational and technical assistance.     

The impact of public employment on labour market performance: evidence from African countries

Using census data for Ghana, Mali and Mozambique, we study the long-term impact of public sector employment on local labour markets. We find that the public sector crowds out private employment and induces skilled workers to queue for a public job, thus increasing their unemployment rate. In addition, a growing public sector fosters employment in the tradable and nontradable sectors, remarkably for the unskilled, and the reallocation of unskilled workers away from agriculture.     

Gross job flows in Ukraine

This paper documents and analyses gross job flows and their determinants in Ukraine using a dataset of more than 2200 Ukrainian firms operating in manufacturing and non‐manufacturing for the years 1998–2000. Job destruction dominates job creation in both 1999 and 2000. Another clear‐cut result of our analysis is the strong positive effect of new private firms on net employment growth. We also find an inverse relationship between job reallocation and size for both manufacturing and non‐manufacturing, while only in the latter sector is employment growth inversely related with size. The main focus of the paper is the effect of trade flows on employment adjustment in manufacturing. Our results show that both employment growth and job reallocation at the firm and two‐digit sector level are affected by strong exposure to import competition and product market competition in export markets. These effects are more pronounced when we consider trade flows to the world at large and to the EU than when the analysis is based on trade flows to the CIS. JEL Classifications: E24, F14, J63, P23.