• Media type: Report; E-Book
  • Title: Offshoring, low-skilled immigration, and labor market polarization
  • Contributor: Mandelman, Federico S. [Author]; Zlate, Andrei [Author]
  • imprint: Atlanta, GA: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, 2014
  • Language: English
  • Keywords: international business cycles ; F41 ; labor migration ; task upgrading ; offshoring ; labor market polarization ; F16 ; heterogeneous agents
  • Origination:
  • Footnote: Diese Datenquelle enthält auch Bestandsnachweise, die nicht zu einem Volltext führen.
  • Description: During the last three decades, jobs in the middle of the skill distribution disappeared, and employment expanded for high- and low-skill occupations. Real wages did not follow the same pattern. Although earnings for the high-skill occupations increased robustly, wages for both low- and middleskill workers remained subdued. We attribute this outcome to the rise in offshoring and low-skilled immigration, and we develop a three-country stochastic growth model to rationalize this outcome. In the model, the increase in offshoring negatively affects the middle-skill occupations but benefits the high-skill ones, which in turn boosts aggregate productivity. As the income of high-skill occupations rises, so does the demand for services provided by low-skill workers. However, low-skill wages remain depressed as a result of the surge in unskilled immigration. Native workers react to immigration by upgrading the skill content of their labor tasks as they invest in training.
  • Access State: Open Access