Foreign-owned plants and job security

2016

In this paper, we study how foreign ownership of Swedish companies affects employment and wages. To study these effects, we specify a model based on the assumption that the Swedish labour market can be described as one where trade unions and employers bargain over employment and wages. Our hypothesis is that bargaining power is affected by institutional settings and the ownership of the firm. To test our hypothesis, we used a panel data set of 242 large Swedish manufacturing firms over the period 1980-2005. The results indicate no significant impact of foreign ownership on employment or wages in Sweden.

This paper provides evidence that the presence of foreign workers in plants increases the likelihood that those plants will export their output. This informs both the macro literature on trade costs and the micro literature on plants' export behaviour. Using a rich linked employer-employee dataset, we identify the nationality of each worker in a large sample of German plants, and relate this to the exporting behaviour of that plant. We find a significant effect of worker nationality on exporting which is not driven by the industrial, occupational or locational concentration of migrants. The effect is much stronger for senior occupations, who are more likely to have a role in exporting decisions by the plant. The relationship is also stronger when we consider exports to particular regions and workers from those regions.

Journal of International Economics, 2007

Numerous studies based on firm-level data have reported higher average wages in foreign-owned firms than in domestically-owned firms. This, however, does not necessarily imply that the individual worker's wage increase with foreign ownership. Using detailed matched employer-employee data, we examine the effect of foreign ownership on individual wages, controlling for individual and firm heterogeneity as well as for possible selection bias in foreign acquisitions. We distinguish between foreign greenfields and takeovers and compare foreign ownership with both domestic multinationals and local firms. Our results indicate that employees in foreign-owned firms do not have systematically higher wages than comparable workers in similar Swedish owned firms.

Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal

This paper investigates the effects of offshoring on individual job satisfaction and perceived risk of job loss. The authors merge microdata from the German Socioeconomic Panel dataset (SOEP) with indicators of insertion in global value chains at the industry level for the period 2000-2013. They test two hypotheses. First, the authors investigate whether workers in industries with higher offshoring intensity report lower job satisfaction and/or are more prone to be unsecure at their jobs. Second, they test whether these effects differ among four categories of collars. Their findings indicate that offshoring is associated with lower job satisfaction. The results are also indicative of some heterogeneity in the offshoring effect, with high skilled white-collar workers being mostly unaffected by offshoring and low skilled blue-collar workers showing the largest negative effects. Discriminating between manufacturing and services activities, the authors find that the extent of heterogeneity and the offshoring effect is relatively larger in manufacturing industries. They also find that the effect of offshoring intensity upon job satisfaction is more negative and significant in periods of economic decline. Finally, the results show that offshoring is not significantly related with job insecurity, a result that applies to all workers' categories. Still, in a period of economic decline job insecurity may increase when the offshoring intensity rises.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

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Journal for Labour Market Research

We compare the wages of skilled workers in multinational enterprises (MNEs) versus domestic firms, the earnings of domestic firm workers with past, future and no MNE experience, and estimate how the presence of ex-MNE peers affects the wages of domestic firm employees. The analysis relies on monthly panel data covering half of the Hungarian population and their employers in 2003–2011. We identify the returns to MNE experience from changes of ownership, wages paid by new firms of different ownership, and the movement of workers between enterprises. We find high contemporaneous and lagged returns to MNE experience and significant spillover effects. Foreign acquisition has a moderate wage impact, but there is a wide gap between new MNEs and domestic firms. The findings, taken together, suggest that MNE employees accumulate partly transferable knowledge, valued in the high-wage segment of the local economy that is connected with the MNEs via worker turnover.

Review of World Economics, 2024

Offshoring continues to be an important dimension of firms' internationalization choices. However, offshoring also increases contract enforcement costs by inhibiting the coordination and monitoring of performance. Immigrant employees may reduce such costs through their specific knowledge of the employer, their country of birth and access to foreign networks. In this paper, we investigate the role of immigrant employees within firms on firm offshoring, employing rich administrative Swedish microlevel data that include specific information about the characteristics of employees, manufacturing firms and their bilateral offshoring. Our results support the hypothesis that immigrant employees increase offshoring by lowering contract enforcement costs. Hiring one additional immigrant employee is linked to a relatively larger increase in offshoring at the intensive than the extensive margin, on average. The association to offshoring is considerably stronger for skilled immigrant employees and for contract and R&D intensive offshoring. Instrumental variable estimations demonstrate qualitatively similar results, while a placebo test with randomized immigrant employment does not generate any link between immigrants and offshoring.

2004

This paper describes the characteristics of manufacturing establishments in Britain over the period 1980 to 1996. Particular attention is paid to differences between plants of different ownership nationality. The findings suggest that establishments that are always foreign-owned have significantly higher labour productivity than those that remain under domestic ownership. In addition, labour productivity improves faster over time and faster with age in foreign-owned establishments. The difference in labour productivity is matched by an equivalent difference in levels of investment per employee. Establishments that change ownership nationality do not seem to experience very large changes in labour productivity levels. The proportion of skilled workers in the workplace, and wages for both skilled and operative workers are higher in foreignowned establishments than domestic-owned, in line with differences in labour productivity.

WZB conference paper, 2001

The paper addresses the argument concerning the growth of the ‘global firm’ and the apparent detachment of MNCs from their home base in an increasingly ‘borderless world’. A counter literature has developed which provides a necessary corrective to the more extreme ‘globalization thesis’. We briefly summarise this debate before arguing that the pace of internationalisation of MNCs in the second half of the 1990s suggests that a re-assessment is now necessary. We develop the argument that the wave of cross-border tie-ups in the last few years has created a number of firms which have roots in two rather than one business system (ie. they are ‘bi-national’) and which have a wide geographical spread (while they may not be ‘global’ many are certainly pan-European and/or trans-Atlantic). These developments thus present a challenge to the ‘country of origin effect’. The paper elaborates this argument with secondary data on recent cross-border mergers and acquisitions, before considering the implications of these developments for employee participation within these organisations.

International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2012

We study the relationship between offshoring and job stability in Italy in the period 1995-2001 by using an administrative dataset on manufacturing workers. We find that the international fragmentation of production negatively affects job stability. Service offshoring and material purchases from developed countries foster job-to-job transitions within manufacturing of all workers and white collars, respectively. However, the most detrimental effects for job stability come from material offshoring to low income countries which drives blue collar workers out of manufacturing. Therefore, policy interventions should especially focus on this latter category of workers more exposed to fragmentation processes and foreign competition.