Does offshoring pay? Firm-level evidence from Japan.
Hijzen, Alexander ; Inui, Tomohiko ; Todo, Yasuyuki 等
I. INTRODUCTION
The rise in offshoring--as reflected by the rising importance of
imported intermediate inputs in domestic production--has been an
important factor behind the growth in world trade (Yeats 1998; Yi 2003).
East Asia is not an exception to the rise in offshoring: The growing
geographical specialization along the value chain has given rise to the
development of sophisticated production sharing arrangements within East
Asia (Fukao, Ishido, and Ito 2003; Ng and Yeats 1999). In particular,
Japanese firms have increasingly taken advantage of the business
opportunities provided through offshoring of production activities to
other East Asian countries (Kimura and Ando 2005).
Given the importance of these developments, understanding
implications of offshoring should be of significant interest to
academics and the policy-making community. However, most research so far
has concentrated on the potentially adverse labor market aspects of
offshoring in developed countries (Feenstra and Hanson 1996, 1999; Head
and Ries 2002; Hijzen, Gorg, and Hine 2005), and much less attention has
been directed toward understanding the benefits of the offshoring
phenomenon. However, firms may benefit from offshoring through the
improvement of the productivity of primary factors of domestic
production by allowing firms to specialize in activities they perform
relatively well.
For our analysis of the impact of offshoring on productivity, we
make use of firm-level data for the Japanese manufacturing sector during
the period 1994-2000. One great advantage of our data set is that it
comprises information on the value of purchases of products, parts, and
components from foreign providers so that we can construct a direct
measure of materials offshoring. (1) This measure includes both sourcing
to the firm's foreign affiliates and sourcing to other unaffiliated
foreign firms. We refer to the combination of the two types of sourcing
of intermediate inputs as "overall offshoring." In addition,
we have data on the amount of purchases from the firm's foreign
affiliates, which provides us with a proxy for the extent of
international sourcing within the firm, or "intrafirm
offshoring." (2) In contrast, we refer to sourcing from
unaffiliated foreign firms as "arm's-length offshoring."
(3) By including both measures simultaneously, we can infer to what
extent the organizational form of offshoring, intrafirm or arm's
length, influences productivity of the sourcing firm. Finally, we also
consider the effects of sourcing to domestic providers, which we refer
to as "domestic sourcing." Figure 1 provides a schematic overview of the various types of sourcing mentioned above.
Several previous studies have analyzed the relation between
offshoring and productivity using industry-level data. For the
measurement of offshoring, such studies typically rely on input-output
data. Egger and Egger (2006) analyze how offshoring affects the
productivity of low-skilled workers employed in the European Union
manufacturing sector. They find that the rise in offshoring accounted
for 6% of the increase in value added per worker during the period
1992-1997. Amiti and Wei (2006) analyze the productivity effects of
materials and services offshoring on the productivity of U.S.
industries. They find that both materials and services off shoring have
a positive effect on productivity but that the positive effect of
services offshoring is considerably larger, accounting for about 11% of
productivity growth during the sample period compared to 5% for
materials offshoring.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Gorg and Hanley (2005) and Gorg, Hanley, and Strobl (2008) were the
first to analyze the impact of offshoring on productivity using
firm-level data. The main advantage of using firm-level data is, no
doubt, that they allow one to control for firm heterogeneity. Using data
for Ireland, they find that both materials and services offshoring
benefit firm productivity but that the benefits only accrue to
multinationals and exporters. Criscuolo and Leaver (2005) who focus
exclusively on services offshoring also find a positive impact on
productivity using data for the United Kingdom. (4)
This study contributes to the existing literature in the following
three ways. First, thanks to the richness of our data set, we can
distinguish between the impact of intrafirm and arm's-length
offshoring by incorporating a measure for overall offshoring and another
one specifically for intrafirm offshoring. In addition, our data set
allows us to examine possible differences in the impact on productivity
between offshoring and domestic sourcing. (5) Finally, to the best of
our knowledge, this study is the first to explore the impact of
offshoring on productivity in the context of Japan. (6)
To preview our results, we find that intrafirm offshoring has
generally a positive effect on total factor productivity (TFP) at the
firm level. We control for the possible endogeneity of offshoring due to
reverse causality by employing the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation developed by Blundell and Bond (1998). The results
suggest that the median firm that engages in intrafirm offshoring gains
an annual TFP growth rate that is 0.6 percentage point higher than that
of nonoffshoring firms. In contrast to intrafirm offshoring, either
arm's-length offshoring or domestic sourcing does not generally
affect firm-level productivity. Interestingly, arm's-length
offshoring has a negative impact on the productivity of
nonmultinationals and nonexporters, while its impact on the productivity
of multinationals and exporters is nonnegative. This may indicate that
sourcing of intermediate inputs to unaffiliated foreign firms tends to
be inefficient particularly due to presence of nonnegligible costs of
searching foreign firms that meet the needs of the offshoring firm. This
seems particularly important for firms with limited international
experience. This is consistent with previous findings by Gorg and Hanley
(2005) and Gorg, Hanley, and Strobl (2008).
The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Section II
discusses the theoretical framework, whereas Section III explains
empirical methodology. Section IV describes the data and provides some
descriptive statistics on offshoring. In Section V, we discuss the
estimation results. Finally, Section VI concludes.
II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Offshoring may affect firm-level productivity mainly because it
allows firms to benefit from static and dynamic gains from
specialization. Consider a developed country firm whose production
process is characterized by multiple stages of various skill intensity.
Offshoring labor-intensive (or less skill intensive) stages allows the
firm to make a more efficient use of production factors that remain in
employment and thus increase the firm's productivity. Moreover, the
gains from specializing in skill-intensive stages of production process
may be dynamic rather than static. Young (1991), for example, suggests
that productivity growth in more sophisticated skill-intensive
production stages may be higher than in less skill-intensive stages
because of the potential of productivity growth through learning by
doing in such activities. Since the more standardized, less
skill-intensive activities are most suitable to offshoring, one would
expect that specializing in skill-intensive production through
offshoring generates higher growth in productivity thanks to the
increasing importance of learning-by-doing effects. Therefore,
offshoring may be expected to improve both the level and the growth of
productivity within firms.
The size of these benefits from offshoring, however, is likely to
depend on the way supplier networks are organized. For example, a firm
that offshores production to its own affiliate abroad may find it easier
to control product quality than firms that offshore to unaffiliated
firms abroad. If this is indeed the case, intrafirm offshoring should be
more productivity enhancing than arm's-length offshoring.
Similarly, the productivity effects associated with international
production networks may be more pronounced than those associated with
domestic supplier networks as skill and factor differentials tend to be
larger internationally.
In addition to the way supplier networks are organized, the
benefits from offshoring may also depend on characteristics of sourcing
firms. In particular, as Gorg and Hanley (2005) and Gorg, Hanley, and
Strobl (2008) argue, the benefits from offshoring depend on a
firm's experience in foreign markets since this may help to reduce
the search costs associated with identifying suitable suppliers abroad.
Hence, they posit that exporting and multinational firms benefit more
from offshoring than firms that have no overseas experience, as they are
likely to find suitable foreign firms more easily.
So far, we have discussed causality from offshoring to
productivity. However, firm-level productivity may also affect the
decision to offshore as well as the way offshoring is organized. Antras
and Helpman (2004) show theoretically in a model with incomplete
contracts and firm heterogeneity building on the work by Antras (2003)
and Melitz (2003) that a firm's organizational structure arises
endogenously as a function of firm-level productivity and the (industry
specific) intensity of intermediate inputs in production. They show that
as a result of the larger fixed costs associated with offshoring, only
the most productive firms tend to engage in offshoring, while less
productive firms tend to outsource to domestic firms. In addition, in
industries where intermediate inputs are less important, the most
productive firms tend to engage in intrafirm offshoring rather than
arm's-length offshoring in an effort to counteract hold-up
problems. The finding of Tomiura (2007) using firm-level data from Japan
that firms that engage in arm's-length offshoring tend to be less
productive than firms that engage in intrafirm offshoring is consistent
with these theoretical predictions.
Therefore, the relationship between productivity and offshoring may
work in two ways, suggesting that we have to carefully distinguish
between causality from off shoring to productivity, which is the focus
of this article, and causality in the reverse direction, the focus in
Tomiura (2007). The next section describes how we deal with this
distinction in our estimation.
III. EMPIRICAL METHODOLOGY
In line with recent production function studies such as those by
Aghion et al. (2004), we adopt a two-step estimation procedure in which
we first derive a TFP measure and then estimate the effect of offshoring
on TFP. In this section, we first describe how we construct our various
TFP measures, then derive the estimation equation and finally discuss
our estimation method.
A. Measures of TFP
To analyze the impact of offshoring on firm productivity, we define
two different measures of TFP. We use two measures to ensure that our
results do not rely on the choice of TFP measure. First, we employ the
chained multilateral index of firm-level TFP based on the methodology in
Caves, Christensen, and Diewert (1982) and Good, Nadiri, and Sickles
(1996). This index is defined as follows:
(1) [MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
where subscripts i and t represent firm i and year t, respectively.
Y refers to value added, K to capital, L to labor, and [s.sub.ijt] is
the cost share of factor J for firm i in year t. [bar.ln [Y.sub.t]],
[bar.ln [J.sub.t]], and [bar.[s.sub.Jt]] are the arithmetic means of In
[Y.sub.it], [ln.sub.Jit], and [s.sub.iJt], respectively, across all i in
the same three-digit industry in year t. (7) Equation (1) implies that
the multilateral TFP index, [TFP.sub.IN.sub.it], measures firm i's
TFP level in year t relative to the TFP level of the hypothetical firm
in year 0 whose input shares are equal to the arithmetic mean of input
shares and whose output and input quantities are equal to the geometric
mean of output and input quantities, respectively. This type of
multilateral TFP index is used, for example, in Aghion et al. (2004).
Second, we derive a regression-based measure of firm-level TFP
through the estimation of a standard Cobb-Douglas production function:
(2) In [TFP.sub.it.sup.OP] = ln [Y.sub.it] - [[??].sub.K]ln
[K.sub.it] - [[??].sub.L]ln [L.sub.it],
where [[??].sub.K] and [[??].sub.t] represent the estimated capital
and labor elasticity, respectively. To allow for differences in the
production technology across industries, we divide manufacturing firms
into six industries (8) and estimate [[??].sub.K] and [[??].sub.L] for
each industry. More specifically, to estimate [[??].sub.K] and
[[??].sub.L], we take account of the potential correlation between
factor inputs and productivity generated from the fact that
contemporaneous productivity affects the choice of factor inputs and the
choice on firms' exit. Several procedures have been proposed that
allow one to do this including that by Olley and Pakes (1996) and its
extensions by Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) and Buettner (2003). This
article uses Olley and Pakes (1996) method since this is more widely
used, for example, in Javorcik (2004), than its extensions, probably due
to requirements of strong assumptions in other methods. (9) Table 1
reports the results of estimating Equation (2) using both standard
ordinary least squares (OLS) and the OlleyPakes procedure. In principle,
one would expect the Olley-Pakes estimate of the elasticity for labor to
be smaller than the OLS estimate due to the positive correlation between
labor inputs and unobserved productivity shocks, whereas an opposite
pattern is expected in the case of the elasticity of capital. Table 1
indicates that these theoretical predictions are generally supported by
the evidence, justifying our use of the Olley-Pakes measure of TFP. (10)
It is not obvious which of our two measures of TFP should be
preferred. An advantage of the multilateral TFP index given by Equation
(1) is that we do not need to assume a specific functional form of the
production function, while its drawback is that we have to assume
perfect competition and constant returns to scale. In contrast, a major
benefit of the regression-based TFP measure obtained from the
Olley-Pakes method is that we do not need to assume constant returns to
scale. Its main shortcoming lies in assuming a Cobb-Douglas production
function. Therefore, these two measures of TFP can be viewed as
complements.
Although these TFP measures are widely used for productivity
analysis, we should note a shortcoming of these measures in our
analysis, which stems from the fact that we deflate nominal values of
outputs and inputs by industry-level average prices to compute their
real values due to lack of information on prices for each firm. (11)
Because of this, both of our TFP measures may capture markups and demand
shocks in addition to true productivity. This issue is discussed in
Klette and Griliches (1996), Katayama, Lu, and Tybout (2003), and De
Loecker (2007) among many others. In the context of this article, if off
shoring firms can purchase components from foreign firms at lower than
average industry prices, the TFP measures can improve simply due to the
price effect without any improvement in the true productivity. While a
number of solutions to this problem have been suggested in the existing
literature, we do not employ any of these in this article for two
reasons: (a) because these solutions typically require strong
assumptions on demand or (b) because additional information on product
prices is needed, which is not available in our data set. However, as we
will argue in Baseline Results section, biases due to this price effect
are unlikely to be large in the present article.
B. Estimation Equation
Based on the argument in Section II, we hypothesize that the extent
of offshoring has a positive effect on the growth of firm-level TFP.
Since our data set includes data for both overall offshoring and
intrafirm offshoring, we incorporate both in our estimation equation of
TFP growth. We also include domestic sourcing and, following Griliches
(1980), research and development (R&D) intensity as possible
determinants of TFP growth. The lagged value of TFP is further included
to allow for convergence in TFP levels. Thus, our estimation equation of
TFP growth is given by:
(3) [MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
where [TFP.sub.it] is one of the two measures of TFP discussed in
the previous subsection. [OFFl.sub.i,t-1], [OFF2.sub.i,t-1], and
[DOM.sub.i,t-1] represent the extent of overall offshoring, intrafirm
offshoring, and domestic sourcing, respectively, for firm i in year t -
1. (12) R&[D.sub.i,t-1] is the R&D intensity for firm i defined
as the ratio of R&D expenditure to value added. We use first lags of
these variables since we assume a 1-yr time lag between sourcing and
R&D activities and productivity growth. Subscript j denotes the
industry affiliation of firm i so that [[alpha].sub.jt] represents
industry-year-specific fixed effects and [[epsilon].sub.it], it is the
error term.
Since our theoretical argument suggests that offshoring may affect
both the level and the growth of TFP, we rearrange Equation (3) so that
the dependent variable is the TFP level, In [TFP.sub.it]:
(4) [MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
This rearrangement enables us to interpret the estimated
coefficients on offshoring and domestic sourcing as their effects on
either level or growth of TFP. Moreover, this specification allows one
to more readily compare the present results with those reported in
previous studies such as those by Gorg and Hanley (2005), Gorg, Hanley,
and Strobl (2008), and Amiti and Wei (2006), who also employ a level
regression similar to that of Equation (4). Note that, in contrast to
these existing studies, we explicitly control for the role of the
R&D activities in TFP growth. Failing to do so may lead to omitted
variable bias, when the decision to offshore and expenditure on R&D
are correlated.
More specifically, the measure of overall offshoring, OFF1, is
represented by the ratio of real purchases of products, parts, and
components to foreign providers to real value added of the firm. Real
purchases of products, parts, and components to foreign providers are
defined as their nominal value, which can be directly obtained from each
firm's survey response, deflated by the price level of intermediate
goods at the three-digit industry level. Similarly, real value added is
constructed from nominal sales deflated by the three-digit industry
price level of outputs less nominal intermediate inputs deflated by the
industry price level of intermediate goods. Since the survey question on
offshoring does not distinguish between purchases from unaffiliated and
affiliated firms, this measure embodies both intrafirm and
arm's-length offshoring.
In addition, OFF2, the measure of intrafirm offshoring, in
particular, is defined as the ratio of nominal purchases from the
firm's own foreign affiliates deflated by the industry price level
of intermediate goods to real value added. Unfortunately, the survey
question refers to all purchases from foreign affiliates including
purchases of products, parts, and components, which are included in OFF1
and related to offshoring, as well as raw materials, which are not
included in OFF 1 and less likely to be related to offshoring.
Therefore, OFF2 may be considered a "broad" measure of
intrafirm offshoring, whereas OFF1 constitutes necessarily a
"narrow" measure of overall offshoring. Nevertheless, by
including both measures simultaneously, we can get some idea to what
extent the organizational form of offshoring, intrafirm, or arm's
length influences the firm's productivity. (13)
The intensity of domestic sourcing, DOM, is represented by the
ratio of the nominal purchases of products, parts, and components to
domestic providers, taken directly from the data set, deflated by the
industry price level of intermediate goods to real value added. (14)
Table 2 summarizes the definition of the key variables used in the
present analysis.
C Estimation Method
An econometric concern that needs to be addressed when estimating
Equation (4) is the endogeneity of regressors. Specifically, estimation
will be biased if firms decide to self-select into off shoring on the
basis of productivity differences across firms, as suggested by Antras
and Helpman (2004) (see Section II for a more detailed discussion).
Since we start from the growth Equation (3), which can be obtained from
first differencing a TFP-level equation, the error term in Equation (4),
[[epsilon].sub.it], is in fact a first-differenced error term in the
TFP-level equation. Since the offshoring measures are first lagged, we
would expect the coefficients on offshoring to be downward biased when
more productive firms are more likely to engage in offshoring, that is,
when there is positive contemporaneous correlation between the level of
productivity and offshoring. The same applies to our domestic sourcing
and R&D variables.
Therefore, we employ the system GMM estimation developed by
Blundell and Bond (1998) to correct for the possible endogeneity of any
of our right-hand side variables in Equation (4) and to eliminate
firm-specific fixed effects. In the system GMM estimation, we apply GMM
estimation to the system of Equation (4) and its first difference in
which firm-specific fixed effects are eliminated, using the lagged
first-differenced regressors as instruments for Equation (4) and the
lagged regressors as instruments for the first-differenced equation.
More specifically, we use as instruments the second and third lags of
endogenous regressors (15) for the first-differenced equation and their
second 1 st-differenced lags for the level equation. We employ one-step
GMM using robust standard errors.
IV. DATA DESCRIPTION AND SUMMARY STATISTICS
The data employed in this article are drawn from Kigyo Katsudo
Kihon Chosa (Basic Survey of Enterprise Activities), which is conducted
annually by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. This data set
covers all firms with more than 50 employees and 30 million yen of
assets in manufacturing, mining, and commerce industries. Participation
in the survey for those firms is compulsory. The survey was first
conducted in 1991 and then annually from 1994 onward. We restrict
ourselves to manufacturing firms during the period 1994-2000 since for
more recent years, no information on domestic or international sourcing
is available. (16)
Figure 2 provides time trends in the measures of offshoring and
domestic sourcing. During the period 1994-1999, the average overall
offshoring intensity (OFF1) rises from 1.2% to 1.8% in terms of value
added, whereas the average intrafirm offshoring intensity (OFF2) rises
from 3.4% to 5.3%. In contrast to the increasing trend in the overall
and intrafirm offshoring intensity, the trend in the domestic sourcing
intensity (DOM) is negative. (17)
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
It is worth noting that the intrafirm offshoring intensity, OFF2,
in our data set is greater on average than the overall offshoring
intensity, OFF1. This may be surprising as one would expect intrafirm of
f shoring to be a subset of overall offshoring. The fact that this is
not the case in practice reflects differences in the definition between
the two variables mentioned earlier. OFF2 consists of all purchases from
the firm's foreign affiliates, including purchases of raw material
that may not be related to offshoring, whereas OFFI includes only
purchases of products, parts, and components from foreign providers,
which is directly related to offshoring. In other words, OFF2 is based
on a substantially broader definition of offshoring than OFF1.
Figure 3 represents the offshoring intensity across different
industries showing significant industry variation. According to the
overall offshoring measure, the apparel and leather industries appear to
be the most active offshoring industries in Japan. Both industries are
relatively intensive users of unskilled labor and well-known examples of
offshoring industries. The presence of large foreign-home wage
differentials are likely to play an important role in explaining the
offshoring decisions in these two industries. The electrical machinery
and electronics industry and the medical, precision, and optical
instruments industry are also industries where offshoring is important.
While production in these industries may be characterized as fairly high
tech overall, the production process also consists of less
skill-intensive activities.
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
Figure 3 also shows that industries with large overall offshoring
intensity tend to exhibit large intrafirm offshoring intensity as well.
There are, however, some exceptions. Most notably, the coke and
petroleum products industry shows an extremely large value of OFF2,
while showing a value of OFF1 close to zero. This of course reflects the
fact that OFF2 includes raw materials, whereas OFF 1 does not.
We present summary statistics for the regressand and regressors as
well as TFP growth in Table 3. Panel A provides summary statistics for
the full sample, while Panel B provides a comparison of the means for
the same variables between firms that offshore and those that do not
offshore. We are particularly interested in the relationship between the
offshoring and the level and growth of TFP. The descriptive statistics
indicate that firms that engage in overall offshoring or intrafirm
offshoring exhibit a higher productivity level and faster productivity
growth than nonoffshoring firms. (18) Offshoring firms also are more
active on average in domestic sourcing and R&D than other firms. In
our formal econometric analysis, we will now examine whether off shoring
in fact leads to higher productivity, controlling for other possible
factors and endogeneity due to reverse causality.
V. RESULTS
A. Baseline Results
Table 4 presents the baseline results on the impact of off shoring
on TFP based on estimations using the multilateral index of TFP. Note
that in these regressions, we can interpret the coefficient of the
regressors as their impact either on the TFP level or on the TFP growth
(not just the level) because the independent variables include the first
lag of the dependent variable.
To provide a benchmark, we first discuss the results based on
standard OLS reported in columns (1)-(3) of Table 4 before going to the
results based on system GMM. The results in columns (1) and (2) show
that both overall offshoring and intrafirm off shoring have a positive
and significant effect on TFP when included separately, but the effect
of overall offshoring is only significant at the 10% level when the two
variables are included jointly (column (3)). (19) Domestic sourcing and
R&D have a significant and positive effect on TFP at least at the
10% level in all the three specifications. However, these results may be
biased when offshoring decisions are positively correlated with the
productivity level, for example, when firms self-select into offshoring.
Indeed, the finding that overall offshoring has a positive effect on
productivity and its coefficient is also larger than that on domestic
sourcing is consistent with the theoretical predictions of Antras and
Helpman (2004) and the empirical findings of Tomiura (2007): the most
productive firms engage in offshoring, less productive firms tend to
source domestically and the least productive firms do not make use of
supplier networks of any kind.
To examine whether the correlation between offshoring variables and
productivity found in the OLS regressions reflects the effect of
offshoring on productivity or the other way around, we reestimate our
model employing the system GMM. The results are reported in columns
(4)-(6) of Table 4. In all specifications, the Hansen J statistic and
the ArrellanoBond statistic presented in the last two rows suggest that
the instruments are orthogonal to the error term and that there is no
serial correlation in the error term.
The system GMM estimations point at statistically significant
effects of intrafirm offshoring, OFF2, on TFP (columns (5) and (6)).
These effects are larger than the results from the OLS estimations,
suggesting that the OLS results are downward biased due to a positive
contemporaneous correlation between offshoring and unobserved
productivity shocks and accordingly a negative correlation between
offshoring and first-differenced productivity shocks. (20) More
specifically, the GMM results suggest that a 1 percentage point increase
in the intrafirm offshoring intensity raises TFP by 0.12%. This suggests
that for the median offshoring firm, for which OFF2 equals 0.052, (21)
TFP growth rate is 0.6 percentage point higher than when it had not
engaged in off shoring, everything else equal. Thus, we conclude that
the effect of intrafirm offshoring on TFP growth is quantitatively
large.
In contrast to the positive impact of intrafirm offshoring, the
measure of overall offshoring, OFF1, has no significant impact in any
GMM estimation (column (4) or (6) of Table 4). Thus, we find that while
intrafirm off shoring within a multinational raises the productivity,
arm's-length offshoring does not have such impact in general,
suggesting that sourcing of intermediate inputs to affiliated foreign
firms is more effective than sourcing to unaffiliated foreign firms.
This finding is consistent with previous findings by Gorg and Hanley
(2005) and Gorg, Hanley, and Strobl (2008) that suggest that offshoring
is productivity improving only for firms with experience in
international markets through either exporting or foreign direct
investment.
In addition, we find that the domestic sourcing intensity has a
positive but insignificant impact on TFP in all GMM estimations. This
result confirms our presumption that small differentials in skills and
factor prices among domestic firms may lead to small, or even
negligible, benefits from domestic sourcing.
In summary, we find that the multilateral TFP index is positively
correlated with the extent of intrafirm offshoring but not with the
extent of arm's-length offshoring or domestic sourcing. However,
the results should be interpreted with caution since inputs are deflated
by industry-level average prices, rather than firm-level prices, so that
this TFP measure may overstate the true productivity level for
offshoring firms (see the discussion in Measures of TFP section). The
measurement error in TFP, given by the difference between the TFP
measure and the true TFP level, is captured by the error term in
Equation (4). Since offshoring is the source of and thus is correlated
with the measurement error, the price effect will induce endogeneity
bias in the off shoring variables. This certainly is a problem in the
OLS estimations but may also affect the GMM results when the instruments
are weak. However, the result that the effect of overall offshoring is
positive and significant in the OLS estimations while it is
insignificant in GMM suggests that our GMM estimations are quite
effective in correcting for biases due to the price effect. Since the
price effect should influence the OLS and GMM estimates on the two
measures of offshoring, overall and intrafirm, to a similar extent, a
positive and significant effect of intrafirm off shoring in both OLS and
GMM estimations indicate that intrafirm offshoring has a positive effect
on productivity after controlling for the price effect.
B. Robustness Checks
To check the robustness of the baseline results in the previous
section, we employ the following three alternative specifications.
First, we use Olley and Pakes (1996) regression-based measure of TFP
instead of the multilateral TFP index used in the baseline regressions.
(22) The OLS and GMM results are represented in columns (1) and (2) of
Table 5. The p value of the Hansen J statistics for the GMM estimation
is close to zero in the GMM estimation using the Olley-Pakes measure,
implying that instruments are not orthogonal to the error term. (23)
Although the Hansen test suggests that the GMM results using the
Olley-Pakes measure are biased, the results on offshoring and domestic
sourcing are qualitatively the same as and quantitatively very similar
to the baseline results using the multilateral TFP index.
Second, we use ratios to sales, rather than value added, when we
construct the offshoring, domestic sourcing, and R&D intensity
variables as well as our multilateral TFP index. The OLS and GMM results
from these modifications are presented in columns (3) and (4) of Table
5. These results are virtually the same as the baseline results except
that thep value of the impact of intrafirm offshoring is barely above
5%.
Finally, we use the second-lagged regressors, rather than the first
lagged in the baseline regressions, to account for possible time lags
between sourcing activities and productivity improvement. The results
shown in columns (5) and (6) of Table 5 indicate that intrafirm
offshoring 2 yr before also has a positive and significant impact on the
current productivity, although the impact is smaller in size than the
impact of intrafirm offshoring using the first lag. This evidence
suggests that the impact of off shoring diminishes over time. As in the
baseline regressions, neither overall offshoring nor domestic sourcing
has an impact on productivity.
In summary, all the three alternative estimations lead to results
similar to those in our baseline specification, supporting our
conclusion that intrafirm offshoring is productivity improving, while
arm's-length offshoring and domestic sourcing are not.
C. Differences in the Size of the Effect of Offshoring across Firms
So far, we have estimated the average effect of offshoring on TFP,
ignoring any possible variation in the size of effect across firms.
However, the size of the offshoring effect may be expected to depend on
the degree of firms' experience in international markets since the
benefits from off shoring may vary in the level of the search costs
associated with selecting foreign suppliers (Section II). Gorg, Hanley,
and Strobl (2008) therefore split the sample between multinational
enterprises (MNEs) and domestic firms and exporters and nonexporters and
find that experience in foreign markets matters.
Following this idea, we split the sample into two subsamples in two
different ways: MNEs and local firms (24) and exporting and nonexporting
firms. (25) Table 6 reports the means of the key variables for the
various subsamples. It can be seen from the table that there exist no
major differences in terms of their offshoring profiles between
exporters and nonexporters. However, we do observe, perhaps not
surprisingly, that MNEs are more important offshorers than purely
domestic firms. MNEs, after all, have access to an international
production works, which have been established with the express purpose
of offshoring or at the very least may be expected to facilitate
offshoring arrangements.
To formally examine how the impact of offshoring on productivity
depends on such firm characteristics, we augment Equation (4) with
interaction terms between the respective offshoring measures and the
certain firm characteristics. First, we estimate whether the effect of
the overall off shoring measure differs between multinational and
domestic firms using the interaction term based on a dummy variable for
MNEs and the overall offshoring measure. (26) The GMM results presented
in column (1) of Table 7 show that the coefficient on the interaction
term is positive and significant at the 10% level, whereas the
coefficient on the overall off shoring measure itself is negative and
significant. In addition, the hypothesis that the sum of the
coefficients on the overall offshoring variable and its interaction term
with the MNE dummy is zero cannot be rejected. These results imply that
the impact of arm's-length offshoring on TFP is zero for MNEs, (27)
while it is negative for local firms probably due to large search costs.
This is consistent with Gorg, Hanley, and Strobl (2008).
Second, we employ the interaction term between a dummy variable for
exporting firms and each of the two measures of offshoring. Column (2)
of Table 7 shows that the interaction term between the export dummy and
the overall offshoring has a positive but insignificant effect, while
the measure of overall offshoring is negatively correlated with TFP. The
sum of the two variables is not statistically different from zero. These
results provide further evidence that for firms without international
experiences such as exporting, offshoring has a negative impact on
productivity presumably due to the presence of nonnegligible search
costs.
VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the present article, we explore the impact of offshoring on firm
productivity using firm-level data for the Japanese manufacturing
industries during the period 1994-2000. We find that intrafirm
offshoring, that is, sourcing of intermediate inputs to foreign
affiliates within a particular multinational firm, has generally a
positive effect on productivity of the offshoring firm, while
arm's-length offshoring, that is, sourcing to unaffiliated foreign
firms, does not have such an effect. These effects are robust to
controlling for the possible endogeneity of offshoring due to reverse
causality from productivity to off shoring. In addition,
arm's-length offshoring has a negative impact on the productivity
of non-MNEs and nonexporters, while its impact on the productivity of
MNEs and exporters is nonnegative. These results suggest that the costs
of searching foreign firms suitable for offshoring are nonnegligible.
Although our findings shed some light on the offshoring literature,
we should note that our results need to be interpreted with care. First,
offshoring may induce measurement error in the dependent variable
through its impact on product prices thereby introducing a bias in our
results. However, we believe that this bias does not have major impact
on our results, as we discussed in Baseline Results section.
Second, we only allow the offshoring intensity (as well as the
domestic sourcing and the R&D intensity) to shift the isoproduct
curve and we do not allow for an effect of offshoring that leads to .the
rotation of the isoproduct curve. In other words, we only focus on Hicks neutral productivity effects and disregard the role of offshoring as a
channel for skill-biased technological changes as, for example, Feenstra
and Hanson (1996) argue. The present empirical model may thus be
considered as a short-run model in which factor shares are constant.
(28)
Finally, our empirical specification only captures partial
equilibrium effects and disregards general equilibrium effects. In the
long run, however, general equilibrium effects are also likely to affect
productivity, if, for example, individual offshoring decisions at the
firm level are concentrated in certain sectors so as to induce
sector-wide technological change. (29) Therefore, the results of the
present article should be interpreted at the level of the individual
firm and cannot straightforwardly be used to make inferences about the
total effect of offshoring on the Japanese economy.
ABBREVIATIONS
GMM: Generalized Method of Moments
MNE: Multinational Enterprises
OLS: Ordinary Least Squares
R&D: Research and Development
TFP: Total Factor Productivity
doi: 10.1111/j.1465-7295.2008.00175.x
APPENDIX: CONSTRUCTION OF VARIABLES
This appendix provides supplementary information on the
construction of our data set. (30) To construct data employed in the
present analysis, we use firm-level data from Kigyo Katsudo Kihon Chosa
(KKKC, Basic Survey of Enterprise Activities) and industry-level data
from the Japan Industry Productivity (JIP) Database 2006. The JIP
Database 2006 is constructed by the Firm- and Industry-Level
Productivity Research Group organized in the Research Institute of
Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) of Japan and headed by Kyoji Fukao
and Tsutomu Miyagawa. The JIP Database 2006 includes various data during
the period 1970-2002 at the three-digit industry level, including price
deflators of output, intermediate inputs, and capital goods and
input-output matrices. The complete database is available at the Web
site of RIETI (http://www.rieti.go.jp).
Real sales is defined as nominal total sales reported in KKKC
deflated by the output deflator at the three-digit level taken from the
JIP Database. The nominal value of intermediate inputs is defined as the
sum of costs of goods sold and general and administrative expense minus
labor costs and the value of depreciation. The nominal value of
intermediate inputs is deflated by the intermediate goods deflator also
taken from the JIP Database to obtain the real value of intermediate
inputs. Real value added is defined as real sales less the real value of
intermediate inputs.
Firms' real capital stock represents the real value of the
stock of tangible fixed assets excluding land since the book value of
land may not reflect the true value of the land, in particular, if the
land was purchased long time ago. However, the value of land owned by
each firm is available only in the KKKC data for 1995 and 1996, although
information on the total value of tangible fixed assets including land
is available for all years. Therefore, we estimate the nominal value of
tangible fixed assets excluding land of firm i in industry j in year t,
Nom[K.sub.ijt], by multiplying the firm's total tangible assets
including land by one minus industry j's average share of the land
value in the total tangible fixed assets in 1995 and 1996. Then, we
derive the real capital stock of firm i in industry j in year t,
[K.sub.ijt], from Nom[K.sub.ijt], using the industry total of nominal
tangible fixed assets excluding land, Nom[K.sub.jt] =
[[SIGMA].sub.i[epsilon]j] Nom[K.sub.itt], and the estimated real value
of the corresponding variable, [K.sub.jt], taken from the JIP Database:
[K.sub.ijt] = Nom[K.sub.ijt] x [K.sub.jt]/ Nom[K.sub.jt]. [K.sub.jt], is
obtained by the perpetual inventory method, using industry-level data on
fixed capital formation during the period 1975-2000 and industry-level
data on fixed assets in 1975.
Labor inputs are measured in the man-hour base. Since information
on working hours for each firm is not available in KKKC, we use the
industry average of working hours taken from the JIP Database. R&D
expenditure of each parent firm is deflated by the industry price
deflator of intermediate inputs.
We limit our sample to firms whose TFP level, R&D expenditure,
the measure of offshoring, and the measure of domestic sourcing are
available for at least five consecutive years during the 7-yr period
1994-2000. Then, to alleviate biases due to outliers, we drop firms
whose R&D, offshoring, or domestic sourcing intensity is among the
top 1%.
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(1.) Due to limitations of our data set, we focus on materials
offshoring and neglect services offshoring. Services offshoring has
recently become the center of the offshoring debate but does not come
close, as of yet, to the importance of materials off shoring (Amiti and
Wei 2006). Particularly, in Japan, materials off shoring has been more
prevalent than services offshoring. In 2000, the share of imported
material inputs in total output amounted to 2.7%, while the share of
imported service inputs in total output amounted to 0.7% (Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development 2007, chapter 3).
(2.) This corresponds to "international insourcing" used
in Olsen (2006).
(3.) One may also refer to this as international outsourcing.
(4.) See Olsen (2006) for an excellent survey on the productivity
impact of offshoring.
(5.) Domestic sourcing includes both sourcing to unaffiliated
domestic firms (domestic outsourcing) and sourcing to affiliated
domestic firms (domestic insourcing).
(6.) Kimura (2002) analyzes the relationship between sourcing to
domestic firms and productivity but does not consider international
sourcing. Tomiura (2005) analyzes the determinants of offshoring
decisions. He finds that firms that engage in offshoring tend to be
larger and more productive than firms that do not offshore, suggesting
that there may be sizable fixed costs associated with offshoring.
(7.) See the Appendix for more details on the construction of data.
(8.) When we use more detailed industry classification such as the
International Standard Industry Classification (ISIC) two-digit
classification, we find that for some industries, the elasticity of
labor or capital is above one. We obtain these clearly unfavorable
results probably because the number of firms is small in some two-digit
industries and hence outliers would affect estimation results.
Therefore, we classify firms into only six industries.
(9.) We did, however, also implement the procedure proposed by
Buettner (2003) resulting in very similar findings as in the case of
Olley and Pakes's TFP measure.
(10.) The only exception is the machinery sector for which the
estimated elasticity of capital using Olley and Pakes exceeds that using
OLS.
(11.) We thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
(12.) A more precise definition of these variables will be
presented below.
(13.) The inclusion of raw materials in OFF2 and its exclusion in
OFF1 also explains why we cannot simply subtract OFF2 from OFF 1 to
explicitly measure intrafirm and arm's-length offshoring.
(14.) Thus, DOM is consistent with the narrow definition of
offshoring used in OFF1.
(15.) Since regressors are first lagged, instruments for the
first-differenced equation in which the dependent variable is In
[TFP.sub.it] - ln[TFP.sub.i,t-1] are the offshoring and other variables
in years t - 3 and t - 4. When we instead use variables in years t - 2
and t - 3 as instruments, the Hansen J statistic indicates that the
instruments are not orthogonal to the error term as may be expected.
(16.) Data for 2000 are only used to construct the TFP level,
whereas data for the period 1994-1999 contain information on offshoring
and domestic sourcing. Since we use the third lagged variables as
instruments, our dependent variable is the TFP level from 1997 to 2000.
(17.) However, given the short nature of our panel any inferences
regarding the time trend should be taken with caution.
(18.) The multilateral TFP index indicates firm-level TFP relative
to the hypothetical average firm in the same industry at the initial
period (see Measures of TFP section). Therefore, it is not meaningful to
compare the multilateral TFP index between firms in different industries
or compare it with the Olley-Pakes TFP measure of the same firm.
(19.) One may argue that the insignificance of the overall
offshoring measure is due to multicollinearity between the overall
offshoring measure and the infrafirm offshoring measure. However, the
correlation coefficient between the two variables is only .12.
(20.) Amiti and Wei (2006) also observe that the effect of
offshoring increases once they control for the correlation between
offshoring and unobserved productivity shocks.
(21.) We use the median rather than the mean because the
distribution of OFF2 is highly skewed.
(22.) The correlation coefficient of the growth rate of the two TFP
measures is .99.
(23.) Another notable difference is that the size of the estimated
coefficient on the R&D intensity is substantially smaller in the
case of the Olley-Pakes measure than in the baseline regressions.
(24.) MNEs are defined as firms that report a positive balance of
capital investment to foreign companies.
(25.) As noted in Note 19, the multilateral TFP index of a firm
cannot be compared with that of another firm in a different industry.
Therefore, we do not show average value of the TFP index for the
subsamples.
(26.) We do not use the interaction term between the MNE dummy and
the intrafirm offshoring measure since local firms should not be engaged
in intrafirm offshoring by definition.
(27.) Note, however, that the impact of intrafirm offshoring is
still positive as we found in the previous estimations.
(28.) This characterization is convenient for the present case as
we are interested in the benefits of offshoring to the firm rather than
the distributional issues, which have preoccupied the large share of the
existing literature.
(29.) See Kohler (2004) and Hijzen (2007) for more a detailed
analysis of such general equilibrium effects.
(30.) When importing raw data sets, we heavily relied on Stata
programs written by Toshiyuki Matsuura for Matsuura (2004).
ALEXANDER HIJZEN, TOMOHIKO INUI and YASUYUKI TODO *
* This research was conducted as part of a project on industry- and
firm-level productivity in Japan undertaken at the Research Institute of
Economy, Trade and Industry. The authors would like to thank RIETI for
providing us the opportunity of conducting this research and the
Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for providing us valuable data
sets. The authors are also grateful to Kyoji Fukao, Tsutomu Miyagawa,
Jungsoo Park, Eiichi Tomiura, Masaru Yoshitomi, and seminar participants
at the RIETI-21 st Century COE Hi-Stat Program Workshop and the RIETI DP
seminar for helpful comments and suggestions and Young Gak Kim, Hyeog Ug
Kwon, and Toshiyuki Matsuura for their help in constructing the data
set. In addition, the authors are particularly grateful to three
anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Inui thanks the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific
Research). Hijzen gratefully acknowledges financial support from the
Leverhulme Trust (Grant No. F114/BF). The opinions expressed and
arguments employed in this article are the sole responsibility of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect those of RIETI or any of the
institutions the authors belong to.
Hijzen: Economist, OECD and GEP, University of Nottingham, Paris,
Cedex 16, France. Phone +33-01-4524-9261, Fax +33-0-1-4524-9098, E-mail
alexander. hijzen@oecd.org
Inui: Professor, College of Economics, Nihon University,
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8360, Japan. Phone + 81-33219-3468, Fax +
81-3-3219-3468, E-mail inui@eco. nihon-u.ac.jp
Todo: Associate Professor, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences,
University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 2778563, Japan. Phone
+81-4-7136-4863, Fax +81-71364842, E-mail yastodo@k.u-tokyo.ac.jp
TABLE 1
Estimated Elasticity of Labor and Capital
Food, Textiles, Furniture,
Beverages, Apparel, Paper,
Industries Tobacco Leather Publishing
Elasticity of labor
OLS 0.472 0.807 0.927
Olley-Pakes 0.399 0.706 0.829
Elasticity of capital
OLS 0.535 0.260 0.219
Olley-Pakes 0.616 0.434 0.327
Machinery,
Chemical, Electrical
Petroleum, Machinery,
Industries Rubber Metal Transport Equipment
Elasticity of labor
OLS 0.690 0.669 0.955
Olley-Pakes 0.639 0.649 0.897
Elasticity of capital
OLS 0.412 0.393 0.216
Olley-Pakes 0.407 0.427 0.287
TABLE 2
List of Key Variables
Variable Name Description Definition
OFF1 Overall offshoring Ratio of purchases of
(intrafirm and products, parts, and
arm's-length components from foreign
offshoring) providers to value added
OFF2 Intrafirm offshoring Ratio of purchases of any kind
from the firm's own foreign
affiliates to value added
DOM Domestic sourcing Ratio of purchases of
products, parts, and
components from domestic
providers to value added
R&D R&D intensity Ratio of R&D expenditure to
value added
TABLE 3
Summary Statistics
Standard
Variable Mean Deviation Minimum Maximum
(A) Whole Sample
1nTFPIN 0.224 0.496 -4.118 2.774
InTFPoP -4.197 0.461 -8.841 -1.440
AlnTFPIN 0.011 0.344 -4.705 3.034
AInTFPoP 0.009 0.343 -4.705 3.028
OFF I 0.018 0.073 0.000 0.844
OFF2 0.052 0.238 0.000 11.974
DOM 0.468 0.673 0.000 5.218
R&D 0.076 0.094 0.000 0.631
Subsamples OFFI > 0 OFFI = 0 OFF2 > 0 OFF2 = 0
(B) Offshoring versus
Nonoffshoring Firms
Number of observations 1,669 8,461 2,967 7,163
1nTFPIN 0.321 0.205 0.318 0.185
1nTFPoP -4.163 -4.203 -4.126 -4.226
AlnTFPIN 0.018 0.010 0.020 0.007
AlnTFPoP 0.015 0.008 0.019 0.005
OFF I 0.110 0.000 0.035 0.011
OFF2 0.073 0.048 0.178 0.000
DOM 0.933 0.376 0.547 0.435
R&D 0.092 0.072 0.095 0.068
Note: See Table 2 for the definition of the variables used.
TABLE 4
Baseline Results
Dependent Variable: Log of the
Multilateral TFP Index
(1) (2)
Regressor OLS OLS
1n[TFP.sub.t-1] Lagged TFP 0.784 (0.007) ** 0.784 (0.007) **
OFF1 Overall 0.083 (0.035) *
offshoring
OFF2 Intrafirm 0.066 (0.011) **
offshoring
DOM Domestic 0.007 (0.004) *** 0.008 (0.004) *
sourcing
R&D R&D 0.288 (0.029) ** 0.285 (0.029) **
Number of observations 10,130 10,130
[R.sup.2] .76 .76
Hansen J statistic
Arrellano-Bond statistic
Dependent Variable: Log of the
Multilateral TFP Index
(3) (4)
Regressor OLS GMM
1n[TFP.sub.t-1] Lagged TFP 0.784 (0.007) ** 0.620 (0.047) **
OFF1 Overall 0.059 (0.035) *** 0.077 (0.115)
offshoring
OFF2 Intrafirm 0.063 (0.011) **
offshoring
DOM Domestic 0.007 (0.004) *** 0.025 (0.020)
sourcing
R&D R&D 0.285 (0.029) ** 0.609 (0.154) **
Number of observations 10,130 10,130
[R.sup.2] .77
Hansen J statistic .69
Arrellano-Bond statistic .05
Dependent Variable: Log of the
Multilateral TFP Index
(5) (6)
Regressor GMM GMM
1n[TFP.sub.t-1] Lagged TFP 0.616 (0.048) ** 0.612 (0.047) **
OFF1 Overall 0.081 (0.129)
offshoring
OFF2 Intrafirm 0.124 (0.046) ** 0.123 (0.(46) **
offshoring
DOM Domestic 0.020 (0.020) 0.022 (0.020)
sourcing
R&D R&D 0.635 (0.156) ** 0.618 (0.160) **
Number of observations 10,130 10,130
[R.sup.2]
Hansen J statistic .80 .66
Arrellano-Bond statistic .06 .07
Notes: See Table 2 for the definition of the variables used. Standard
errors are in parentheses. All specifications include industry-year
dummies. P values are reported for Hansen J statistics and the
Arellano-Bond statistics for second-order serial correlation.
*** Significant at 10% level; * significant at 5% level; and **
significant at 1% level.
TABLE 5
Robustness Checks
Dependent Variable: Log of TFP
(1) (2)
OLS GMM
TFP Constructed by
Olley and Pakes (1996) Method,
Regressor Modification Not Multilateral TFP Index
1n[TFP.sub.t-1] Lagged TFP 0.803 (0.007) ** 0.549 (0.050) **
OFF1 Overall 0.059 (0.036) *** 0.084 (0.133)
offshoring
OFF2 Intrafirm 0.063 (0.011) ** 0.106 (0.043) *
offshoring
DOM Domestic 0.005 (0.004) 0.006 (0.022)
sourcing
R&D R&D 0.082 (0.030) ** 0.280 (0.170) ***
Number of observations 10,130 10,130
[R.sup.2] .730
Hansen J statistic .000
Arrellano-Bond statistic .094
Dependent Variable: Log of TFP
(3) (4)
OLS GMM
Variables Based on Sales,
Regressor Modification Not Value Added
1n[TFP.sub.t-1] Lagged TFP 0.813 (0.006) ** 0.574 (0.045) **
OFF1 Overall 0.048 (0.033) 0.033 (0.112)
offshoring
OFF2 Intrafirm 0.055 (0.015) ** 0.083 (0.042) ***
offshoring
DOM Domestic -0.004 (0.005) 0.013 (0.019)
sourcing
R&D R&D 0.215 (0.025) ** 0.653 (0.172) **
Number of observations 10,130 10,130
[R.sup.2] .791
Hansen J statistic .172
Arrellano-Bond statistic .461
Dependent Variable: Log of TFP
(5) (6)
OLS GMM
Second Lags for Regressors,
Regressor Modification Not First Lags
1n[TFP.sub.t-1] Lagged TFP 0.781 (0.007) ** 0.599 (0.048) **
OFF1 Overall -0.005 (0.038) -0.027 (0.078)
offshoring
OFF2 Intrafirm 0.053 (0.013) ** 0.058 (0.031) ***
offshoring
DOM Domestic -0.001 (0.004) 0.015 (0.010)
sourcing
R&D R&D 0.239 (0.030) ** 0.236 (0.067) **
Number of observations 10,130 10,130
[R.sup.2] .763
Hansen J statistic .083
Arrellano-Bond statistic .009
Notes: See Table 2 for the definition of the variables used. Standard
errors are in parentheses. All specifications include industry-year
dummies. P values are reported for Hansen J statistics and the
Arrelano-Bond statistics for second-order serial correlation.
*** Significant at 10% level; * significant at 5% level; and **
significant at 1% level.
TABLE 6
Means of Variables for Various Subsamples
Subsamples MNEs Local Firms Exporters
Number of observations 4,887 5,243 7,810
1n[TFP.sup.OP] -4.149 -4.242 -4.176
[DELTA]1n[TFP.sup.IN] 0.018 0.004 0.013
[DELTA]1n[TFP.sup.0P] 0.017 0.001 0.010
OFF1 0.027 0.010 0.019
OFF2 0.113 0.000 0.054
DOM 0.522 0.391 0.469
R&D 0.100 0.065 0.090
Subsamples Nonexporters
Number of observations 2,320
1n[TFP.sup.OP] -4.267
[DELTA]1n[TFP.sup.IN] 0.005
[DELTA]1n[TFP.sup.0P] 0.003
OFF1 0.015
OFF2 0.060
DOM 0.408
R&D 0.053
Notes: See Table 2 for the description of the variables used.
Multinational firms are defined as firms with any positive balance in
foreign investment.
TABLE 7
Effect of FDI and Export on Impacts of Offshoring
Dependent Variable: Log
of TFP Index
Regressor X (Interacted Variable)
In[TFP.sub.t-1] Lagged TFP
OFF1 Overall offshoring
OFF1 x X
OFF2 Intrafirm offshoring
OFF2 x X
DOM Domestic sourcing
R&D R&D
Number of observations
Hansen J statistic
Arrellano-Bond statistic
Dependent Variable: Log
of TFP Index
(2)
GMM
Regressor Dummy for MNEs
In[TFP.sub.t-1] 0.540 (0.055) **
OFF1 -0.496 (0.227) *
OFF1 x X 0.545 (0.321) ***
OFF2 0.159 (0.043) **
OFF2 x X
DOM 0.027 (0.021)
R&D 0.646 (0.180) **
Number of observations 10,130
Hansen J statistic .376
Arrellano-Bond statistic .178
Dependent Variable: Log
of TFP Index
(3)
GMM
Regressor Dummy for Exporting Firms
In[TFP.sub.t-1] 0.523 (0.055) **
OFF1 -0.440 (0.193) *
OFF1 x X 0.388 (0.258)
OFF2 0.139 (0.032) **
OFF2 x X 0.034 (0.097)
DOM 0.022 (0.021)
R&D 0.638 (0.180) **
Number of observations 10,130
Hansen J statistic .120
Arrellano-Bond statistic .199
Notes: See Table 2 for the definition of the variables used. Standard
errors are in parentheses. All specifications include the interacted
variable X and industry-year dummies. P values are reported for Hansen
J statistics and the Arrelano-Bond statistics for second-order serial
correlation. FDI, foreign direct investment.
*** Significant at 10% level; * significant at 5% level; and **
significant at 1% level.