Outsourcing Potentials and International Tradability of Jobs. Evidence from German Micro-Level Data

We analyze the offshorability of jobs using the German Qualifications and Career Survey. The paper differentiates between outsourcing potential and international tradability and systematically uses a large set of potential determinants of organizational and spatial relocation derived from the existing literature on offshoring. Applying principal component analysis, we are able to compute two indicators explaining both the outsourcing potential and the international tradability of an individual employee according to the characteristics of the job performed. The results show that there is significant variation along the two dimensions across tasks, occupations, and industries. We apply our results to analyze the effects of outsourcing potential and international tradability on individual income and find that especially the latter has a negative effect. Moreover, our computed indicators can be used to further investigate the economic effects of offshoring potential.