International Outsourcing, R & D and the Evolution of Wages: the Case of Italian Industry

The aim of this paper is to empirically evaluate the impact of inter-national outsourcing of materials and services and of R&D expenditu-res on wages of skilled and unskilled workers in Italian industry during the period 1985 − 1997, merging an administrative data set on wor-kers ’ wages with data on imported inputs from Italian input-output tables and from OECD data on R&D.Our results suggest that R&D intensity has a (negligible) positive impact on real wages, while the fragmentation of production is responsible for increasing wage dispa-rities, because it lowers the wages of Blue Collars, leaving unchanged or raising the remunerations of White Collars. Paper prepared for the XXI “Convegno Nazionale di Economia del Lavoro”