Martina Magli

Title: The effects of services offshoring at home. An aggregate and quantile analysis across sectors and local labour markets.

Abstract: The effects of offshoring services on labour markets are ambiguous because any job losses may be offset by increases in productivity that in turn lead to new employment opportunities and higher wages.  The present work combines unique detailed firm-level datasets of Great Britain to estimate the elasticities of employment and wages to services offshoring exposure. Being able to exactly locate geographically firms and trade flows, the analysis explores the heterogeneity of the effects between sectors and local areas taking into account direct and indirect effects of services offshoring. Aggregate analysis is complemented with quantile analysis, which allows to link the results to the literature on trade and inequality. To address the possible endogeneity of services offshoring, sector-specific exposure to services imports in other high income countries are used as instrumental variable. Results show that employment and average wages have positive elasticities to services offshoring, with effects depending on firms' trade status and on workers' characteristics. Further, services offshoring leads to increases in inequality: most productive firms benefit the most from services offshoring, stretching the differences in employment and wages between firms and hence workers.