Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs

Contents:

Author Info

  • Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano

    () (Bocconi University, CEPR, FEEM and Centro Studi Luca d\'Agliano)

  • Giovanni Peri

    () (University of Caligornia, Davis, NBER and Centro Studi Luca d\'Agliano)

  • Greg. C. Wright

    () (University of Caligornia, Davis)

Abstract

How many \"American jobs\" have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively, is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by promoting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency in firms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? We consider a multi-sector version of the Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) model with a continuum of tasks in each sector and we augment it to include immigrants with heterogeneous productivity in tasks. We use this model to jointly analyze the impact of a reduction in the costs of offshoring and of the costs of immigrating to the U.S. The model predicts that while cheaper offshoring reduces the share of natives among less skilled workers, cheaper immigration does not, but rather reduces the share of offshored jobs instead. Moreover, since both phenomena have a positive \"cost-savings\" effect they may leave unaffected, or even increase, total native employment of less skilled workers. Our model also predicts that offshoring will push natives toward jobs that are more intensive in communication-interactive skills and away from those that are manual and routine intensive. We test the predictions of the model on data for 58 U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 2000-2007 and find evidence in favor of a positive productivity effect such that immigration has a positive net effect on native employment while offshoring has no effect on it. We also find some evidence that offshoring has pushed natives toward more communication-intensive tasks while it has pushed immigrants away from them.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.dagliano.unimi.it/media/WP2010_298.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Centro Studi Luca d\'Agliano, University of Milano in its series Development Working Papers with number 298.

as in new window
Length: 49
Date of creation: 01 Aug 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:csl:devewp:298

Contact details of provider:
Postal: Via Conservatorio 7 - 20122 Milano
Phone: +39 02 503 16486
Fax: +39 02 503 16475
Web page: http://www.dagliano.unimi.it/
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords: Employment; production tasks; immigrants; offshoring;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Antecol, Heather & Cobb-Clark, Deborah A. & Trejo, Stephen, 2001. "Immigration Policy and the Skills of Immigrants to Australia, Canada, and the United States," IZA Discussion Papers 363, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  2. Jonathan Vogel & Arnaud Costinot, 2008. "Matching and Inequality in the World Economy," 2008 Meeting Papers 879, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  3. Andri Chassamboulli & Theodore Palivos, 2010. "“Give me your Tired, your Poor,” so I can Prosper: Immigration in Search Equilibrium," University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics 12-2010, University of Cyprus Department of Economics.
  4. Becker, Sascha & Ekholm, Karolina & Muendler, Marc-Andreas, 2012. "Offshoring and the Onshore Composition of Tasks and Skills," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 96, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
  5. Giovanni Peri & Chad Sparber, 2009. "Task Specialization, Immigration and Wages," Working Papers 91, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
  6. Kristin F. Butcher & John DiNardo, 1998. "The Immigrant and Native-born Wage Distributions: Evidence from United States Censuses," NBER Working Papers 6630, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  7. Ann Harrison & Margaret McMillan, 2009. "Offshoring Jobs? Multinationals and US Manufacturing Employment," Discussion Papers Series, Department of Economics, Tufts University 0741, Department of Economics, Tufts University.
  8. Pol Antràs, 2003. "Firms, Contracts, and Trade Structure," NBER Working Papers 9740, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  9. Barry R. Chiswick & Yew Liang Lee & Paul W. Miller, 2005. "Immigrant Earnings: A Longitudinal Analysis," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 51(4), pages 485-503, December.
  10. Monte, Ferdinando, 2009. "Skill Bias, Trade, and Wage Dispersion," MPRA Paper 14719, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  11. William W. Olney, 2012. "Offshoring, immigration, and the native wage distribution," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 45(3), pages 830-856, August.
  12. Avraham Ebenstein & Ann Harrison & Margaret McMillan & Shannon Phillips, 2009. "Why are American Workers getting Poorer? Estimating the Impact of Trade and Offshoring Using the CPS," NBER Working Papers 15107, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  13. Avraham Ebenstein & Ann Harrison & Margaret McMillan & Shannon Phillips, 2009. "Estimating the Impact of Trade and Offshoring on American Workers Using the Current Population Surveys," Discussion Papers Series, Department of Economics, Tufts University 0742, Department of Economics, Tufts University.
  14. Giorgio Barba Navaretti & Giuseppe Bertola & Alessandro Sembenelli, 2008. "Offshoring and Immigrant Employment: Firm-level Theory and Evidence," Development Working Papers 245, Centro Studi Luca d\'Agliano, University of Milano.
  15. Gene M. Grossman & Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, 2008. "Trading Tasks: A Simple Theory of Offshoring," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(5), pages 1978-97, December.
  16. Maarten Goos & Alan Manning, 2003. "Lousy and Lovely Jobs: the Rising Polarization of Work in Britain," CEP Discussion Papers dp0604, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
  17. Robert C. Feenstra & John Romalis & Peter K. Schott, 2002. "U.S. Imports, Exports, and Tariff Data, 1989-2001," NBER Working Papers 9387, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  18. Franziska Ohnsorge & Daniel Trefler, 2004. "Sorting It Out: International Trade and Protection With Heterogeneous Workers," NBER Working Papers 10959, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  19. Goos, Maarten & Manning, Alan, 2007. "Lousy and lovely jobs: The rising polarization of work in Britain," Open Access publications from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven urn:hdl:123456789/101308, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Blog mentions

As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
  1. How Immigration Reduces Offshoring
    by Ariel Goldring in Free Market Mojo on 2010-11-06 12:00:47
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Heid, Benedikt & Larch, Mario, 2012. "Migration, trade and unemployment," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, vol. 6(4), pages 1-40.
  2. E. Podrecca & G. Rossini, 2012. "Wages and international factors’ mobility," Working Papers wp826, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
  3. Hugo Rojas-Romagosa, 2011. "Wage inequality in trade-in-tasks models," CPB Discussion Paper 196, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
  4. Cosimo BEVERELLI & Gianluca OREFICE & Nadia ROCHA, 2011. "Offshoring and migration in a world with policy spillovers," Departmental Working Papers 2011-25, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
  5. William W. Olney, 2008. "Offshoring, Immigration, and the Native Wage Distribution," Department of Economics Working Papers 2010-12, Department of Economics, Williams College, revised Feb 2011.
  6. Italo Colantone & Rosario Crinò, 2011. "New Imported Inputs, New Domestic Products," Development Working Papers 312, Centro Studi Luca d\'Agliano, University of Milano.
  7. David Hummels & Rasmus Jørgensen & Jakob R. Munch & Chong Xiang, 2011. "The Wage Effects of Offshoring: Evidence from Danish Matched Worker-Firm Data," NBER Working Papers 17496, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:csl:devewp:298

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Chiara Elli).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.