Global Outsourcing of Human Capital and the Incidence of Unemployment in the United States

The study is the first to examine empirically the impact of the new wave of global job outsourcing on skill-specific patterns of involuntary unemployment in the U.S. using the latest individual-level data. The estimates from a probit model show that, so far, global human-capital outsourcing has not shifted the risk of unemployment from lower-skilled to higher-skilled American workers. Overall, the probability of involuntary unemployment is negatively related with the worker’s level of education. For the outsourceable occupations, however, high-skilled workers are currently at a greater risk of unemployment than those with lower skills.