Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP8837
Authors: Laura Abramovsky; Rachel Griffith; Helen Miller
Abstract: The research activities of multinational firms is increasingly mobile raising concerns about displacement of high-skilled employment in headquarter countries. We estimate of the impact offshoring inventors has on firms' use of inventors at home using within firm variation across industries. We use a instrumental variables to tackle possible endogeneity and identify robust bounds on the estimate. We cannot rule out the possibility that foreign inventors displace home inventors, but our main result suggests that a 10% increase in the number of inventors abroad results in a 1.9% increase in the number of inventors at home.
Keywords: Innovation; Patents; Multinational firms; Offshoring
JEL Codes: F21; F23; H30; O30
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| number of inventors employed abroad (O36) | number of inventors at home (O31) |
| growth in foreign GDP per capita (F62) | growth in foreign inventors (O39) |
| growth in foreign inventors (O39) | number of inventors at home (O31) |