Offshoring and skill-upgrading in French manufacturing
- Author(s)
- Juan Carluccio, Alejandro Cunat, Harald Fadinger, Christian Fons-Rosen
- Abstract
Using French manufacturing firm-level data for the years 1996–2007, we uncover a novel set of stylized facts about offshoring behavior: (i) Low-productivity firms (“non-importers”) obtain most of their inputs domestically. (ii) Medium-productivity firms offshore skill-intensive inputs to skill-abundant countries and are more labor intensive in their domestic production than non-importers. (iii) Higher-productivity firms additionally offshore labor-intensive inputs to labor-abundant countries and are more skill intensive than non-importers. We develop a model in which heterogeneous firms, subject to fixed costs, can offshore intermediate inputs of different skill intensities to countries with different skill abundance. This leads to endogenous within-industry variation in domestic skill intensities. We provide econometric evidence supporting the factor-proportions channel through which reductions in offshoring costs to labor-abundant countries have significantly increased firm-level skill intensities of French manufacturers.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Economics
- External organisation(s)
- Universität Mannheim, Foundation Banque de France, University of Surrey, University Pompeu Fabra
- Journal
- Journal of International Economics
- Volume
- 118
- Pages
- 138-159
- No. of pages
- 22
- ISSN
- 0022-1996
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2019.01.001
- Publication date
- 05-2019
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 502003 Foreign trade
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics, Finance
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/offshoring-and-skillupgrading-in-french-manufacturing(dcaed9e4-29e1-4ec0-b93c-f3c05f28f91f).html