Documents Koch, Michael 4 results

"We set up a model of offshoring with heterogeneous producers that captures two empirical regularities of German offshoring firms. There is selection of larger, more productive firms into offshoring. However, the selection is not sharp, and offshoring and non-offshoring firms coexist over a wide range of the revenue distribution. An overlap of offshoring and nonoffshoring firms emerges in our model because, in contrast to textbook models of trade with heterogeneous producers, we allow firms to differ in two technology parameters thereby decoupling the offshoring status of a firm from its revenues. In an empirical analysis, we employ firm-level data from Germany to estimate key parameters of the model and show that ignoring the overlap lowers the estimated gains from offshoring by more than 50 percent and, at the same time, exaggerates substantially the importance of the extensive margin for explaining the evolution of German offshoring over the last 25 years."

"We address the mismatch between existing theoretical models and standard empirical practice in the analysis of the labor market effects of offshoring. While theory focuses on one-sector or two-sector models, empirical studies exploit variation in offshoring across a large number of industries, typically including a linear offshoring term in the analysis. Thereby, these studies implicitly assume a monotonic relationship and ignore general-equilibrium effects across industries. We analyze the effects of offshoring across a continuum of industries with different shares of offshorable tasks that are linked through labor and capital markets in general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE). Our main result is that offshoring generates a hump-shaped pattern of employment changes across industries. While the relocation effect reduces employment in offshoring-intensive industries, labor demand in industries with a high prevalence of domestic production falls because of rising domestic wages and firm exits in general equilibrium. In the empirical part, we test the non-monotonic employment effects of offshoring across industries by focusing on Germany after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We find strong empirical support for the hump shape in the changes of employment across industries with different scopes for offshoring, which is almost entirely due to the extensive margin, underscoring the importance of establishment entry and exit. Finally, we discuss important implications for empirical and theoretical research arising from our study."

We use the most recent wave of the German Qualifications and Career Survey and reveal a substantial wage premium in a Mincer regression for workers performing their job from home. The premium persists within narrowly defined jobs and after controlling for workplace activities and accounts to more then 10%. In a next step, we provide evidence on substantial regional variation in the share of jobs that can be done from home across NUTS2 districts in Germany. Our results suggest that the COVID-19 crisis might affect already poorer regions more heavily as a lower share of workers can work from home there. Hence, looking at regional disparities in terms of different types of occupations is central for policy makers in choosing the right economic policies to mitigate the consequences of the crisis."