【主讲】Hans-Jörg Schmerer (University of Hagen, IAB and CESifo)
【主题】Trade and Tasks: Did German firms react to competition from China?
【时间】2016年11月11日 (周五) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼701室
【语言】英文
【摘要】China’s accession to WTO and its soaring exports fueled a lively debate about potential labor market effects sparked by heightened import competition. Recent empirical evidence shows that workers in the US were losing from intensified trade with China. Their wages and job security in industries more exposed to the import shock from China declined shortly after the shock. Evidence for Germany supports these findings but the negative effects are outweighed by the beneficial effects of exports on labor market outcomes. More in line with the Stolper Samuelson theorem, the German data reveals winners and losers from trade liberalization with China and Eastern Europe. The net effects are even positive. We contribute to the literature by focusing on the question how firm level outcomes reacted to this shock. We are in particularly interested in the task composition within firms. Motivated by a large strand of literature dealing with offshoring, we ask if firms adjusted their share of routine tasks to intensified import competition from China. The common opinion is that firms responded to globalization by a reduction of routine tasks in the production process. Manual labor can be easily outsourced to firms located in low-wage countries, which serves as one potential explanation for stagnant or even declining wages of low-skilled workers. Firms may use offshoring as a threat to discipline unions wage claims and the overall demand for manual workers becomes lower allied to a decline in manual workers’ wages. This trend can be observed not only for Germany but for most of the developed countries in the world. Soaring wages at the top of the income distribution can be linked to stagnant or even declining wages at the bottom, which can be explained by skill-biased technological change and/or offshoring. However, due to data limitations, the established literature somewhat neglected firm-level evidence on the evolution of routine-tasks. We combine different data to overcome this limitation. Our study is based upon the German matched employer-employee data set, which has the advantage that the information about workers within the observed firms is complete. All firms that are identified in the firm-level data can be linked to all its workers in the administrative labor market data that stems from the federal employment agency in Germany. Both data sets can be combined to create the LIAB, a linked worker-firm panel that covers the years 1993 to 2014. Thus, the time span covers China’s rise in the world market. Another data set asks about the task contents of occupations, which can be merged to the LIAB. Our results do not support the hypothesized link between import competition and the share of routine tasks. The import shock had no significant impact on German firms’ share of routine tasks. More surprisingly, we find a negative impact of exports on the share of routine tasks. We also analyze the role of labor market institutions for the hypnotized relationship. Neither unions nor the workers’ council interfered in the firms’ adjustment to globalization.
