Many economists studying America's wage divergence in the 1980's have concluded that its primary cause was a within-industry shift in relative labor demand toward the more-skilled. Following the modeling framework and empirical methods developed in Slaughter (1993), in this paper I try to determine the extent to which outsourcing by multinational corporations contributed to this labor-demand shift. To do this, I use data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on U.S. manufacturing multinationals in the 1980's. My main finding is that the data are inconsistent with U.S. multinationals having outsourced heavily in the 1980's. First, I construct a set of stylized facts about the employment, investment, and production patterns of these firms. I find that most of these facts are inconsistent with widespread outsourcing. Second, to test more rigorously whether these firms substitute between U.S. and foreign production labor I estimate their factor-price elasticities of demand in a translog-cost-function specification. I find that home and foreign production labor at best seem to be weak price substitutes and in fact may be price complements. Taken together, these findings indicate that multinational outsourcing contributed very little to rising wage inequality.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
5253.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 1995 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5253
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Find related papers by JEL classification: F21 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - International Investment; Long-Term Capital Movements J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
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.:
George J. Borjas & Richard B. Freeman & Lawrence F. Katz, 1992.
"On the Labor Market Effects of Immigration and Trade,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Immigration and the Workforce: Economic Consequences for the United States and Source Areas, pages 213-244
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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