Are U.S. White-Collar Really at Risk of Service Offshoring?

This paper deals with recent concerns about potentially negative effects of service offshoring on U.S. white-collar workers. At this purpose, the paper uses highly disaggregated occupational data and develops a Flexible and Separable Translog model in which service offshoring is allowed to affect labor demand for both minor white-collar occupations and major white-collar groups. The model is estimated through Quasi-Maximum Likelihood to account for the presence of corner solutions. Results suggest that concerns about service offshoring are ill-founded: service offshoring stimulates labor demand for the white-collar and changes its skill distribution in favor of high-skilled occupations.