This paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of non-manual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

This paper assesses the potential impact of the ongoing phenomenon of services offshoring (frequently referred to as outsourcing, in the media) by analyzing the occupational structure of the US labor market. It develops a list of occupational attributes of offshoreability, points out the...

This paper shows that the symptoms of the German Disease - high export growth, high unemployment and low real GDP growth - are easily explained by unbalanced real wage growth within the framework of a neoclassic open economy model: In this model unbalanced real wage growth causes unemployment...

This paper studies the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on wages and employment. When labor-management bargaining is industry-wide, two effects of FDI are identified: the collusion effect and the threat-point effect. It is shown that (i) FDI always reduces the negotiated wage, and (ii)...

Outsourcing is an efficient way to reduce a company’s costs and is often necessary to remain competitive. However, the practice has had its critics. This article summarizes the outsourcing debate that has been going on in the United States and offers some insights about the practice. Also...

The Indian software industry appears to provide a startling confirmation of the benefits of multinational investment in a fledgling industrial sector. The main question explored in this paper is how and why this happened. We find that multinational firms had an important catalysing effect on the...

The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the ease with which individuals' tasks can be offshored. Our analysis relates to recent theoretical contributions arguing that there is only a loose relationship between the suitability of a task for offshoring and the...

Little is known about wage determination by multinationals, despite the much-discussed role of globalisation upon wage dispersion. Here we examine industry- and host-country-specific 1998 data on compensation of foreign affiliates of U.S. firms and compare that with U.S. labour-market data. We...

Why do firms decide to offshore certain parts of their production process? What qualifies certain countries as particularly attractive locations to offshore? In this paper we address these questions with a theory of international production hierarchies in which organizations arise endogenously...

Although this paper is, ostensibly, a macro- and micro-economic historical study of competition in the West European woollen textile ind ustries, in France, the Low Countries, England, Italy, and Iberia (Catalonia and Aragon), and of their related wool and cloth trades, covering all of Europe...