multinationals, are less likely to rely on imported or internally provided services. -- international trade ; services ; off-shoring …

Recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate … technologically determined sequence of production steps. In our model, cost savings from offshoring fluctuate along the production … from offshoring even if relocating individual steps would be advantageous. Conversely, small variations in model parameters …

We study ex post outsourcing of production in an imperfectly discriminating contest, interpreted here as a research … tournament or a procurement contest for being awarded some production contract. We find that the possibility of outsourcing …, outsourcing reduces the procurement costs of inducing a given level of effort if the contest organizer can collect entry fees …