OFFSHORE OUTSOURCING DECISION AND CAPITAL INTENSITY:FIRM-LEVEL RELATIONSHIPS

摘要

In offshore sourcing, a firm chooses outsourcing to independent suppliers or in-sourcing from own foreign direct investment (FDI) subsidiaries. Based on the firm-level data on offshore make-or-buy decision covering all manufacturing industries, this paper compares averages, documents inter-firm distributions, and estimates multinomial logit models of the firm's sourcing mode choice. As predicted by previous theoretical models, this paper directly confirms at the firm level that outsourcing firms tend to be substantially labor-intensive compared with firms in-sourcing from the same region, even after the firm's R&D intensity, firm size, or industry is controlled for.