The labor-market effects of service offshoring : a synthetic control approach with high-dimensional microdata

I use novel high-quality survey data on firms' international sourcing activities combined with firm-level financial and linked employer-employee data to study the effect of services offshoring on wages and employment. To overcome the endogeneity related to reverse causality and omitted variables, I use microsynth, a variation of the synthetic control method specially developed for high-dimensional microdata. I find that offshoring firms pay higher wages for both high-skilled and low-skilled workers, and employ fewer FTE workers compared with a synthetic control, but these effects take several years to appear.