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Working Paper
The Labor Market Effects of Offshoring by U.S. Multinational Firms: Evidence from Changes in Global Tax Policies
Estimating the causal effect of offshoring on domestic employment is difficult because of the inherent simultaneity of multinational firms? domestic and foreign affiliate employment decisions. In this paper, we resolve this identification problem using variation in Bilateral Tax Treaties (BTTs), which reduce the effective cost of offshore activity by mitigating double taxation. We derive a panel difference-in-differences research design from a standard model of multinational firms, demonstrating the simultaneity problem and showing how to resolve it using BTTs as an instrument for offshore ...
Working Paper
On Trade Policy Preference and Offshoring Ties
This paper unpacks the role of the domestic content of imports as a novel source of policy interdependence along the global supply chain. We show how a rise in local contents embodied in imports can skew national trade policy preferences, and pull upstream and downstream countries in asymmetric ways with respect to (i) the nature of unilaterally optimal trade policy prescriptions, and (ii) the attractiveness of leveraging market access-based dispute settlement procedures. We discuss the pros and cons of deep trade integration as a remedy, involving well-enforced labor standards both upstream ...
Working Paper
The Multinational Wage Premium and Wage Dynamics
Using detailed administrative data linking French firms and workers over the years 2002-2007, we document a distinct U-shaped pattern in worker-level wages surrounding the time their employer is acquired by a foreign firm, with a dip in earnings observed in years just before domestic firms switch to MNE status. The dip in earnings is evident in both wages and in-kind payments given to workers. {{p}} To guide our empirical approach, we present a model with fair wage considerations among workers and endogenous cross-border acquisition activity among heterogeneous firms that predicts this ...
Working Paper
Currency Areas, Labor Markets, and Regional Cyclical Sensitivity
In his papers during the lead up to the birth of the European Monetary Union, Obstfeld considered whether the countries forming the EMU were sufficiently similar to survive a single monetary policy--and more importantly, whether they had the capacity to adjust to asymmetric shocks given a single monetary and exchange rate policy. The convention at the time was to take the United States as the baseline for a smoothly functioning currency union. We document the evolution of the literature on regional labor market adjustment within the United States, expanding on stylized facts illustrating how ...
Working Paper
On Terms of Trade, Offshoring Ties, and the Enforcement of Trade Agreements
This paper unpacks the role of offshoring in the enforcement of trade agreements. In a two-country model of task offshoring, we show that by depressing demand and thus demand for embodied labor, own-tariff effects on factor content weighted terms of trade are: (i) negative in upstream countries, backfiring on upstream workers, and (ii) positive in downstream countries which render imported labor tasks even cheaper. This progression in own-tariff effects on terms of trade along the supply chain presents a novel challenge to the effectiveness of dispute settlement rules designed to nullify ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature studies the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international trade and show that ...
Working Paper
Offshoring in Developing Countries: Labor Market Outcomes, Welfare, and Policy
Does a reduction in offshoring cost benefit workers in the world's factories in developing countries? Using a parsimonious two-country model of offshoring we find very nuanced results. These include cases where wages monotonically improve, worsen, as well as where wages exhibit an inverted U-shaped relationship with the offshoring cost. We identify qualitative conditions under which these relationships hold. Since global welfare always rises with an improvement in offshoring technology, we find that there is a role for a wage tax or a minimum wage in the developing country. We derive the ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature has studied the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ industry and occupation employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Fertility on Mothers’ Labor Supply over the Last Two Centuries
This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers. Based on a compiled dataset of 441 censuses and surveys between 1787 and 2015, representing 103 countries and 48.4 million mothers, we document three main findings: (1) the effect of fertility on labor supply is small and typically indistinguishable from zero at low levels of development and economically large and negative at higher levels of development; (2) this negative gradient is remarkably consistent across histories of currently developed countries and contemporary cross-sections of countries; and ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature has studied the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ industry and occupation employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international ...