Title: Offshoring and Firm Overlap Speaker: Hans- Jörg Schmerer, University of Hagen, CESifo, and IAB Host: Wei Xiao, Associate Professor, RIEM Time: 14:00--15:30, Dec. 17, Thursday Venue: Room 1211 Gezhi Hall, Liulin Campus Abstract: We set up a model of offshoring with heterogeneous producers that captures two empirical regularities on offshoring firms: larger, more productive firms are more likely to make use of the offshoring opportunity; the fraction of firms that engages in offshoring is positive and smaller than one in any size or revenue category. These patterns generate an overlap of offshoring and non-offshoring firms, which is non-monotonic in the costs of offshoring. In an empirical exercise, we employ firm-level data from Germany to estimate key parameters of the model. We show that ignoring the overlap leads to a severe downward bias in the estimated gains from offshoring, which amounts to almost 60 percent in our model. About the speaker: Hans- Jörg Schmerer is a professor at the University of Hagen. He received his Ph.D. degree in Economics from University of Tübingen. His main research areas are International Trade and Labor Economics. He has published extensively in Journal of Economic Theory, European Economic Review , The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, The World Economy, Canadian Journal of Economics, Economics Letters. His personal web site is http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/oekonomie/en/team/hans-joerg.schmerer.shtml.
