RESEARCH

Working papers

Outsourcing Dynamism. Coauthored with Claudia Macaluso and Chen Yeh.

This paper investigates the increasing importance of domestic outsourcing in U.S. manufacturing. On a yearly basis, one in two manufacturing plants hires at least some of its workers through a temporary help agency. The agency is the employer of record for temporary workers, though they perform their tasks at the client business' premises.  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 and implying that the speed of economic recovery is underestimated.

Recruiting and Mismatch in Peru. Coauthored with Munseob Lee and Claudia Macaluso.


Work in progress

Global Gender Wage Gaps along the Wage Distribution and the Legal and Social Environment. Coauthored with Kathleen Beegle and Josefina Posadas.

Heterogeneity in Post-secondary Human Capital Formation. Coauthored with Darwin Cortés and Julieth Santamaria.                                                                                  Foco Económico entry (in Spanish).


Selected World Bank work and publications

The Economics of the Gender Wage Gap in Armenia (2018). World Bank WPS 8409. Coauthored with Lourdes Rodriguez Chamussy and Nistha Sinha.

Gender differences on sexual behavior and school inputs: Evidence from Bogotá (2015). Universidad del Rosario working paper 175. Coauthored with Darwin Cortés and Juan Miguel Gallego. Presented at LACEA 2016.                                                                                                                                                                                               Foco Económico entry (in Spanish).