SERVICES OUTSOURCING AND INNOVATION: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

摘要

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, domestic outsourcing, profits, and innovation using plant-level data. We find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level. Such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing, but the magnitude is smaller. We also find that international services outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability, as predicted by theory, whereas this is not true for domestic sourcing. The results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis.