A short review of the theoretical and empirical evidence indicates that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has the potential to increase the intensity of competition as well as to act as a channel for technology transfers. One would expect, all else equal, an increase in average productivity...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the effect of ICT investment on the propensity to offshore for a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms. Contrary to previous literature focussing on the service sector, after taking into account the endogeneity of ICT investment in the...

We propose and solve a simple model of firm-level decisions to offshore production stages of lower skill intensity than that of activities that remain in the domestic location. In theory, offshoring is optimal only for the more productive among heterogeneous firms if it entails a fixed cost. In...