Outsourcing Dynamism by Claudia Macaluso

Join us for this weeks Macroeconomics Research Seminar, Summer Term 2023.

Claudia Macaluso, from the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, will present this weeks Macroeconomics seminar.

Abstract

This paper investigates the increasing importance of domestic outsourcing in U.S. manufacturing. Under domestic outsourcing, the agency is the employer of record for temporary workers, though they perform their tasks at the client business’ premises. On a yearly basis, one in two manufacturing plants hires at least some of its workers through a temporary help agency. Furthermore, domestic outsourcing is becoming increasingly more important: the average share of revenue spent on such arrangements has gone up by 85 percent since 2006.

We develop a methodology to transform reported expenses on temporary and leased workers into plant-level outsourced employment counts, using administrative data on the U.S. manufacturing sector. We find that domestic outsourcing is an important margin of adjustment that plants use to modify their workforce in response to productivity shocks. Plant-level outsourced employment adjusts more quickly and is twice as responsive as payroll employment. These micro implications have significant aggregate consequences. Without taking reallocations in outsourced employment into account, the measured pace at which jobs reallocate across workplaces is underestimated. On average, we omit the equivalent of 15 percent of payroll employment reallocations in each year. However, outsourced employment churns at a much higher rate compared to its payroll counterpart. Therefore, the omission of outsourced reallocations can rationalize 37 percent of the secular decline in the aggregate job reallocation rate. Lastly, the extent of mismeasurement varies with the business cycle; falling in downturns and increasing in upturns implying that the speed of economic recovery is underestimated.

This seminar will be held on campus in the Economics Common Room at 4pm on Tuesday 6 June 2023. This event is open to all levels of study and is also open to the public. To register your place, please contact the seminar organisers.

This event is part of the Macroeconomics Research Seminar Series.