Offshoring of medium-skill jobs, polarization, and productivity effect: implications for wages and low-skill unemployment
MPRA - Munich
2015
52 p.
international relocation of industry ; technological change ; unemployment ; unskilled worker ; wages
MPRA Paper
61861
Industrial enterprise
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/
English
Bibliogr.
"We examine the effects of endogenous offshoring on cost-efficiency, wages and unemployment in a task- assignment model with skill heterogeneity. Exact conditions for the following insights are derived. The distributional effect of offshoring (high-) low-skill-intensive tasks is similar to (unskilled-) skill-biased technology changes, while offshoring medium-skill-intensive tasks induces wage polarization. Offshoring improves cost-efficiency through international task reallocation and puts a downward pressure on all wages through domestic skill-task reallocation. If elasticities of task substitution are low (high), the downward pressure on wages in neighboring skill segments is low (high) with a net effect of higher (lower) wages and employment."
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