We provide evidence on how changes in the use of high-skilled workers (inventors) in a foreign location affect a firm's domestic use of the same type of worker. We exploit rich data that provide variation in the location of inventors within multinational firms across industries and countries to control for confounding firm–time and industry factors. We find that a 10% increase in the use of foreign inventors leads to a 1.9% increase in the use of domestic inventors. Our results suggest that foreign and domestic inventors are complementary in the production of knowledge.

Authors

CPP Co-Director
Rachel is Research Director and Professor at the University of Manchester. She was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021.

Research Fellow Institute for Fiscal Studies
Laura is a Research Fellow at IFS. Her current work focuses on tax and social protection policy and programme evaluation in developing countries.

Journal article details
- DOI
- 10.1111/roie.12242
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Issue
- June 2016
Suggested citation
L, Abramovsky and R, Griffith and H, Miller. (2016). 'Domestic Effects of Offshoring High-skilled Jobs: Complementarities in Knowledge Production' (2016)
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