Now IT's Personal: Offshoring and the Shifting Skill Composition of the U.S. Information Technology Workforce
结合IT离岸外包和劳动力微观数据，研究发现拥有离岸IT中心的企业，其本土IT劳动力中从事可贸易职业的比例降低8%，而其他企业则增加3%，且小时工更易受离岸影响。
We combine new information technology (IT) offshoring and IT workforce microdata to investigate how the use of IT offshore captive centers is affecting the skill composition of the U.S. onshore IT workforce. The analysis is based on the theory that occupations involving tasks that are “tradable,” such as tasks that require little personal communication or hands-on interaction with U.S.-based objects, are vulnerable to being moved offshore. Consistent with this theory, we find that firms that have offshore IT captive centers have 8% less of their onshore IT workforce involved in tradable occupations; those without offshore captive centers have increased the proportion of onshore employment in these same occupations by 3%. In addition, we find that hourly IT workers (e.g., IT contractors) are disproportionately employed in tradable jobs, and their onshore employment is 2%–3% lower in firms with offshore captive centers. These findings persist after considering different measures of employment composition, including controls for human capital, firm performance, domestic outsourcing, and whether firms choose to build or buy software. Instrumental variables and corroborating regressions suggest that our estimates are conservative—the magnitude of the effect generally rises after accounting for reverse causality and measurement error. This paper was accepted by by Chris Forman, guest department editor.