Outsourcing Business Service and the Scope of Local Markets
Abstract
This paper examines outsourcing to test whether productivity-enhancing specialization is facilitated in bigger cities. First, the paper provides a theoretical model which shows that greater local demand for a given input promotes the entry of suppliers into a city; the increased number of suppliers then results in lower outsourcing prices and a higher use of outsourcing by final producers, therefore reducing the final producers' production costs. I then test the predictions of the model by examining manufacturing plants' practices of outsourcing business services, by using plant-level data from the 1992 Annual Survey of Manufactures. The empirical results show that an exogenous increase in local demand promotes the entry of service suppliers and increases a firm's probability of outsourcing for white-collar services. In particular, I found that doubling the intensity of the use of a service in a U.S. county, which can be attributed to the industrial composition of the county, results in a 7% to 25% increase in the probability of outsourcing.Download Info
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Paper provided by Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau in its series Working Papers with number 01-15.Length:
Date of creation: Dec 2001
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:01-15
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Related research
Keywords: CES; economic; research; micro; data; microdata; chief; economist;Other versions of this item:
- Yukako Ono, 2001. "Outsourcing business service and the scope of local markets," Working Paper Series WP-01-09, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
References
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Davis, James C. & Henderson, J. Vernon, 2008.
"The agglomeration of headquarters,"
Regional Science and Urban Economics,
Elsevier, vol. 38(5), pages 445-460, September.
- J Vernon Henderson & James Davis, 2004. "The Agglomeration of Headquarters," Working Papers 04-02, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
- Ann Bartel & Saul Lach & Nachum Sicherman, 2005.
"Outsourcing and Technological Change,"
NBER Working Papers
11158, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
- Bartel, Ann P & Lach, Saul & Sicherman, Nachum, 2005. "Outsourcing and Technological Change," CEPR Discussion Papers 5082, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
- Bartel, Ann P. & Lach, Saul & Sicherman, Nachum, 2009. "Outsourcing and Technological Change," IZA Discussion Papers 4678, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- Francis, Bill & Hasan, Iftekhar & John, Kose & Waisman , Maya, 2012. "Urban agglomeration and CEO compensation," Research Discussion Papers 17/2012, Bank of Finland.
- Michael A. Kouparitsas, 2005. "Is there evidence of the new economy in U.S. GDP data?," Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, issue Q I, pages 12-29.
- Yukako Ono & Victor Stango, 2005. "Outsourcing, firm size, and product complexity: evidence from credit unions," Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, issue Q I, pages 2-11.
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