MIS skills for the 1990s: a survey of MIS managers' perceptions
Journal of Management Information Systems
Global disaggregation of information-intensive services
Management Science
MIS Quarterly - Special issue on IS curricula and pedagogy
The new world of information technology outsourcing
Communications of the ACM
Employment outsourcing in information systems
Communications of the ACM
Crafting an HR strategy to meet the need for IT workers
Communications of the ACM
The role of software processes and communication in offshore software development
Communications of the ACM - Supporting community and building social capital
Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy
Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy
Is the World Flat or Spiky? Information Intensity, Skills, and Global Service Disaggregation
Information Systems Research
How offshoring affects IT workers
Communications of the ACM
Mobile phone customer retention strategies and Chinese e-commerce
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
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We combine new information technology (IT) offshoring and IT workforce microdata to investigate how the use of IT offshore captive centers is affecting the skill composition of the U.S. onshore IT workforce. The analysis is based on the theory that occupations involving tasks that are “tradable,” such as tasks that require little personal communication or hands-on interaction with U.S.-based objects, are vulnerable to being moved offshore. Consistent with this theory, we find that firms that have offshore IT captive centers have 8% less of their onshore IT workforce involved in tradable occupations; those without offshore captive centers have increased the proportion of onshore employment in these same occupations by 3%. In addition, we find that hourly IT workers (e.g., IT contractors) are disproportionately employed in tradable jobs, and their onshore employment is 2%--3% lower in firms with offshore captive centers. These findings persist after considering different measures of employment composition, including controls for human capital, firm performance, domestic outsourcing, and whether firms choose to build or buy software. Instrumental variables and corroborating regressions suggest that our estimates are conservative---the magnitude of the effect generally rises after accounting for reverse causality and measurement error. This paper was accepted by by Chris Forman, guest department editor.