Volkswirtschaftslehre, insb. Internationale Wirtschaftsbeziehungen

There has been an intense debate as to the effects of offshoring and global value chains on labor, with the debate centering around possible negative employment and income effects for the low(er) skilled in advanced economies. Although sociological and psychological research has shown that income falls far too short when it comes to subjective well-being (SWB), the globalization's impact on SWB has been surprisingly under-researched. This applies in particular to job satisfaction, including of those negatively affected by seeing their real income depressed. Against this backdrop, we develop a trade model that is capable of capturing job satisfaction in conjunction with the income and distributional effects of offshoring. Contrary to a great many beliefs, our theoretical considerations suggest that those remaining employed may be more satisfied with their jobs, even if suffering from increased competition and from more tasks being offshored. Running a cross-section logistic regression model that combines information on offshoring and job satisfaction, lends support to our theoretical explanations. Accordingly, job satisfaction is on average rated higher in countries with comparatively high offshoring activities. More disaggregated regressions get to the heart of the matter, which is a change in the characteristics of the remaining jobs. Our results stand up to extensive robustness checks with respect to different specifications, measures of globalization, and even when controlling for many of the usually suspected variables with reference to SWB.

The cumulative thesis „The Sector Bias of International Outsourcing – Implications for Industrialized Economies“ includes four manuscripts investigating different implications of the internationalization of production. While International Outsourcing attracted huge attention within the last decade, the sector bias of International Outsourcing still provides several gaps for theoretical as well as empirical research. This theses tries to contribute to fill some of these gaps. The first manuscript “Labor Market Effects of International Outsourcing: How Measurement Matters” empirically investigates measurement differences of International Outsourcing and its effects on labor market estimation results. The manuscript "The Elasticity of Substitution and the Sector Bias of International Outsourcing: Completing the Puzzle" provides a formal model analyzing general equilibrium effects of International Outsourcing. Since there is no empirical evidence supporting the result that the wage gap between high and low skilled labor can indeed decrease if outsourcing takes place in relative low skill intensive industries, the manuscript "International Outsourcing and the Sector Bias: New Empirical Evidence" contributes to fill this gap. The fourth manuscript "International Outsourcing and Wage Rigidity: A Formal Approach and First Empirical Evidence" provides a formal model and empirical evidence of the implications of International Outsourcing when taking place in industries characterized by low skilled wage rigidities. As the results show, a smaller increase in relative high skill wages has to be bought dearly with an increase in low skilled unemployment.