International Outsourcing, Trade, Technology and Job Loss Fears: An Empirical Analysis with Micro-Level Data Preliminary Version

The paper is concerned with the role of international outsourcing and import penetration for determining individual perceived job security. Combining industry-level outsourcing and trade measures with micro-level data from a large household panel survey, we estimate a number of conditional logit models accounting for the ordinal nature of reported job loss fears and individual unobserved heterogeneity. International outsourcing and import penetration on the whole are only found to yield insignificant results. However, more specifically defined outsourcing to low-wage countries significantly lowers perceived job security while outsourcing to high-wage countries significantly raises perceived job security.