Outsourcing Business Service and the Scope of Local Markets
December 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-15
Abstract
This paper examines outsourcing to test whether productivity-enhancing specialization is facilitated in bigger cities. First, the paper provides a theoretical model which shows that greater local demand for a given input promotes the entry of suppliers into a city; the increased number of suppliers then results in lower outsourcing prices and a higher use of outsourcing by final producers, therefore reducing the final producers' production costs. I then test the predictions of the model by examining manufacturing plants' practices of outsourcing business services, by using plant-level data from the 1992 Annual Survey of Manufactures. The empirical results show that an exogenous increase in local demand promotes the entry of service suppliers and increases a firm's probability of outsourcing for white-collar services. In particular, I found that doubling the intensity of the use of a service in a U.S. county, which can be attributed to the industrial composition of the county, results in a 7% to 25% increase in the probability of outsourcing.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Outsourcing Business Service and the Scope of Local Markets' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperOutsourcing Business Service and the Scope of Local Markets🔥
December 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-15
This paper examines outsourcing to test whether productivity-enhancing specialization is facilitated in bigger cities. First, the paper provides a theoretical model which shows that greater local demand for a given input promotes the entry of suppliers into a city; the increased number of suppliers then results in lower outsourcing prices and a higher use of outsourcing by final producers, therefore reducing the final producers' production costs. I then test the predictions of the model by examining manufacturing plants' practices of outsourcing business services, by using plant-level data from the 1992 Annual Survey of Manufactures. The empirical results show that an exogenous increase in local demand promotes the entry of service suppliers and increases a firm's probability of outsourcing for white-collar services. In particular, I found that doubling the intensity of the use of a service in a U.S. county, which can be attributed to the industrial composition of the county, results in a 7% to 25% increase in the probability of outsourcing.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe 1989 Change in the Definition of Capacity: A Plant-Level Perspective
June 2000
Working Paper Number:
CES-00-09
The Survey of Plant Capacity (SPC) is the primary source of data used to construct the Federal Reserve's manufacturing utilization rates. A major restructuring of the SPC in 1989 presents a potential obstacle to constructing measures of utilization that are consistent over time. The object of this study is to take advantage of plant-level data that is available at the Census Bureau's O'ce of the Chief Economist to thoroughly reexamine the link between the historical and current measures of capacity. The preponderance of evidence in this study suggests that preferred utilization is consistent with \full" utilization and, therefore, supports the underlying Federal Reserve methodology for estimating capacity utilization.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperHuman Capital Spillovers in Manufacturing: Evidence from Plant-Level Production Functions
November 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-27
I assess the magnitude of human capital spillovers in US cities by estimating plant level production functions. I use a unique firm-worker matched dataset, obtained by combining the Census of Manufacturers with the Census of Population. After controlling for a plant's own human capital, plant fixed effects, industry-specific and state-specific transitory shocks, I find that the output of plants located in cities that experience large increases in the share of college graduates rises more than the output of similar plants located in cities that experience small increases in the share of college graduates. Several specification tests indicate that the estimated effect is not completely spurious. First, within a city, the spillover between plants that are geographically and economically close is positive, while spillovers between plants that are geographically close but economically distant is zero. Second, most of the estimated spillover comes from hi-tech plants. For non hi-tech productions, the spillover is virtually zero. When I stratify the sample by the percentage of employees who are college educated, I find that the spillover is larger the larger the percentage of college educated workers in the plant. Third, density of physical capital in a city outside a plant has no effect on a plant's productivity. Consistent with a model that includes both standard and general equilibrium forces and spillovers, the estimated productivity differences between cities with high and low levels of human capital match remarkably well differences in labor costs that are typically observed between cities with high and low levels of human capital. This is important because, in equilibrium, any productivity gain generated by human capital spillover should be offset by increased costs.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperPublic Disclosure of Private Information as a Tool for Regulating Environmental Emissions: Firm-Level Responses by Petroleum Refineries to the Toxics Release Inventory
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-13
I investigate whether, as is commonly believed -- and if so how -- firm disclosure of so-called "toxic" releases, required since 1987 by the federal "Toxics Release Inventory ("TRI"), has brought about the reductions in toxic releases that have occurred since that time. Existing literature, consisting principally of event studies of stock market returns, suggest that dirty firms experience abnormal negative returns. Using a micro-level data set that links TRI releases to plant level Census data for petroleum refineries, I study plant-level behavior, exploiting state variation in toxics regulations, and exploring the relationship between TRI releases and concomitant regulation of non-toxic pollutants. I find that, although TRI induced public disclosure may have contributed to the decline in reported toxic releases, that alone has not been the cause of those reductions: the evidence is strong that changes in toxic emission intensity are a byproduct of more traditional command and control regulation of emissions of non-toxic pollutants. I find that (1) since 1987, refineries have become substantially cleaner in terms of over-all toxic releases; (2) the clean-up has not occurred through substitution away from TRI listed substances as inputs or alteration in the mix of outputs; and (3) refineries in states with more stringent supplemental regulation of toxics (e.g. with specific state-wide goals for toxic reductions) have significantly lower toxic emission intensity levels than refineries in other states. I find also that (4) TRI air releases are highly correlated with levels of criteria air pollution; (5) both toxic pollution levels and intensity fall with increases in pollution abatement (operating and maintenance) expenditures for non-toxic air pollution; and (6) TRI air releases are affected by being in more stringent regulatory regions for the criteria air pollutants. Finally, I link my data-set with CRSP data to re-evaluate the effect of TRI reporting on company stock market valuation, correcting for a methodological shortcoming (stemming from the fact that all reporting firms face a common event window) of prior event studies of the impact of the TRI. Correcting for that shortcoming, I find that (7) the evidence of negative abnormal returns around TRI reporting dates for petroleum companies is not significant. My findings suggest that the most probable mechanism through which TRI reporting may induce firms to clean up is local and state governmental use of TRI disclosures. They suggest also not only that the perceived effectiveness of TRI regulation has been overstated, but perhaps more importantly that the benefits of command and control regulation of non-toxic pollutants have been underestimated.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperUSING LINKED CENSUS R&D-LRD DATA TO ANALYZE THE EFFECT OF R&D INVESTMENT ON TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH
January 1989
Working Paper Number:
CES-89-02
Previous studies have demonstrated that productivity growth is positively correlated with the intensity of R&D investment. However, existing studies of this relationship at the micro (firm or line of business) level have been subject to some important limitations. The most serious of these has been an inability to adequately control for the diversified activities of corporations. This study makes use of linked Census R&D - LRD data, which provides comprehensive information on each firms' operations at the 4-digit SIC level. A marked improvement in explaining the association between R&D and TFP occurs when we make appropriate use of the data by firm by industry. Significant relationships between the intensities of investment in total, basic, and company-funded R&D, and TFP growth are confirmed.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperIT Investment and Firm Performance in U.S. Retail Trade
June 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-14
We examine the relationships between investments in information technology (IT) and two measures of retail firm performance -- productivity and establishment growth -- over the 1992 to 1997 period. We use untapped firm and establishment micro data from the Censuses of Retail Trade and the Assets and Expenditures Survey. We show that large firms account for most retail IT investment, employment and establishment growth. We find evidence of a significant relationship between IT investment intensity and productivity growth. We found no such evidence of a link between IT growth in the number of establishments operated by retail firms.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperHas toughness of local competition declined?
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-13
Recent evidence on rm-level markups and concentration raises a concern that market competition has declined in the U.S. over the last few decades. Since measuring competition is difficult, methodologies used to arrive at these findings have merits but also raise technical concerns which question the validity of these results. Given the significance of documenting how competition has changed, I contribute to this literature by studying a different measure of competition. Specifically, I estimate the toughness of local competition over time. To derive this estimate, I use a generalized monopolistic competition model with variable markups. This model generates insights that allows me to measure competition as the sensitivity of weighted-average markup to changes in the number of competitors using directly observable variables. Compared to firm-level markups estimation, this method relaxes the need to estimate production functions. I then use confidential Census data to estimate toughness of local competition from 1997 to 2016, which shows that local competition has decreased in non-tradable industries on average in the U.S. during this time period.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperStructural Change Within Versus Across Firms: Evidence from the United States
June 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-19
We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' 'auxiliary' establishments, we develop a novel measure of proprietary in-house knowledge and show that it is associated with increased growth and industry switching. We rationalize this reallocation in a model where irms combine physical and knowledge inputs as complements, and where producing the latter in-house confers a sector-neutral productivity advantage facilitating within-firm structural transformation. Consistent with the model, manufacturing firms with auxiliary employment pivot towards services in response to a plausibly exogenous decline in their physical input prices.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTechnology and Production Fragmentation: Domestic versus Foreign Sourcing
January 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-35R
This paper provides direct empirical evidence on the relationship between technology and firms' global sourcing strategies. Using new data on U.S. firms' decisions to contract for manufacturing services from domestic or foreign suppliers, I show that a firm's adoption of communication technology between 2002 to 2007 is associated with a 3.1 point increase in its probability of fragmentation. The effect of firm technology also differs significantly across industries; in 2007, it is 20 percent higher, relative to the mean, in industries with production specifications that are easier to codify in an electronic format. These patterns suggest that technology lowers coordination costs, though its effect is disproportionately higher for domestic rather than foreign sourcing. The larger impact on domestic fragmentation highlights its importance as an alternative to offshoring, and can be explained by complementarities between technology and worker skill. High technology firms and industries are more likely to source from high human capital countries, and the differential impact of technology across industries is strongly increasing in country human capital.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperSpatial Organization of Firms: The Decision to Split Production and Administration
February 2004
Working Paper Number:
CES-04-03
A firm's production activities are often supported by non-production activities. Among these activities are administrative units including headquarters, which process information both within and between firms. Often firms physically separate such administrative units from their production activities and create stand alone Central Administrative Offices (CAO). However, having its activities in multiple locations potentially imposes significant internal firm face-to-face communication costs. What types of firms are more likely to separate out such functions? If firms do separate administration and production, where do they place CAOs and why? How often do firms open and close, or relocate CAOs? This paper documents such firms' decisions on their spatial organization by using micro-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau.View Full Paper PDF
