Acemoglu, D. and Autor, D., 2011.

Skills, tasks and technologies: Implications for employment and

earnings. In Handbook of labour economics (Vol. 4, pp. 1043-1171). Elsevier.

Check it out for a baseline estimation/ baseline theory and valuable theoretical and empirical surveys.

Offshorability index: From Acemoglu and Autor (2011) 's appendix (page 93, NBER working paper): they
use O*NET classification for offshorability. Probably we have to rethink the task: face-to-face discussion.
Maurizio, R., 2021. Desafíos y oportunidades del teletrabajo en América Latina. Organización Mundial del
Trabajo.`

We can follow this paper and use workers still doing remote work in IV-2021 as a proxy a potential
offshorability.

Dingel, J.I. and Neiman, B., 2020. How many jobs can be done at home?. Journal of Public
Economics, 189, p.104235.

They use O*NET. But it seems to be "the paper" about this topic.

1. We use surveys describing the typical experience of US workers in nearly 1000 occupations to
classify each occupation as able or unable to be done entirely from home. We find that 37% of
jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home, with significant variation across
cities and industries. These jobs typically pay more than jobs that cannot be done at home and
account for 46% of all US wages.
2. Applying our occupational classification to 85 other countries reveals that lower-income
economies have a lower share of jobs that can be done at home. Developing and emerging
market countries with per capita GDP levels below one-third of US levels may only have half as
many jobs that can be done from home.
3. Our measure, which was constructed using pre-pandemic data, correlates well with early
estimates of the share of workers who have in fact worked from home during the crisis. Our
online replication package reproduces and details all results summarized in the paper.1 We
hope our work proves useful in identifying sectors that can safely operate without spreading the
 virus, in characterizing which workers face greater economic and health risks, and in pondering
the likelihood of a future, after the public health crisis abates, in which remote working is far
more common.
4. All code and data are available at https://github.com/jdingel/DingelNeimanworkathome. Our
code makes it easy for users to explore alternative assumptions about whether any given
occupation can be done from home.
5. We start in Section 2 describing how we construct our work-fromhome measure using surveys
from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). Section 3 reports the results of merging
this occupation-level measure with information from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on
the prevalence of each occupation in the aggregate US economy as well as in particular
metropolitan areas and industries. In Section 4, we merge our classification with occupational
employment data for many countries provided by the International Labour Organization (ILO) to
reveal a positive relationship between the share of jobs that can be done at home and a
country's level of economic development.
6. Our coding of occupational characteristics to determine how flexibly certain jobs can be
relocated has clear roots in the exercise in Blinder (2009) that assessed the "offshorability" of
jobs. While our approach is similar, we cannot simply use Blinder's index because the feasibility
of working from home is quite distinct from offshorability. For example, Blinder and Krueger
(2013) write, "we know that all textile manufacturing jobs in the United States are offshorable."
Textile manufacturing jobs, of course, cannot be performed at home using current production
technologies.
Hatayama, Maho, Mariana Viollaz, and Hernan Winkler. "Jobs' amenability to working from home:
Evidence from skills surveys for 53 countries." World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9241 (2020).

They do not use O*NET but household surveys from 53 countries. They use: “Surveys of Adult
Skills of PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) for 35 countries.
This survey collects information about working-age individuals and covers both rural and urban areas.
Second, we use the STEP (Skills Towards Employability and Productivity) surveys for 15 developing
countries.5 The surveys are representative of urban areas (except Sri Lanka and the Lao People's
Democratic Republic, which included both urban and rural areas) and collect information about
working-age individuals. Finally, we use the Labor Market Panel Surveys (LMPS) for three countries in
the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, namely the Arab Republic of Egypt, Jordan and
Tunisia.” (no tienen Argentina)

1. The paper considers jobs' characteristics and uses internet access at home as an important
determinant of working from home. The findings indicate that the amenability of jobs to
working from home increases with the level of economic development of the country. This is
driven by jobs in poor countries being more intensive in physical/manual tasks, using less
information and communications technology, and having poorer internet connectivity at home.
Women, college graduates, and salaried and formal workers have jobs that are more amenable
to working from home than the average worker.
2. Differences in the organization of production or in the level of technology adoption across
countries imply that the same occupation may be more intensive in face-to-face interactions or
in physical tasks in poorer economies. As a result, using USbased measures to estimate the
amenability to working from home (WFH) in developing countries may lead to biased
conclusions.
3. To overcome this challenge, this paper uses skill and household surveys from 53 countries at
different levels of economic development with rich information on the type of tasks carried out
by people at work. We estimate indexes of the task content of jobs to rank them by their
vulnerability to social distancing measures according to their amenability to a remote setup. In
addition, given that the task data vary at the individuallevel—and not by occupation, as in the
Occupational Information Network (O*NET) classification—we show how the likelihood of being
able to work from home correlates with other characteristics of the individual and his or her job.
4. To measure jobs' amenability to WFH, we exploit all the variables available in the data that
describe job tasks related to home-based work. Instead of using a criterion based on satisfying
at least one sufficient condition to classify occupations, we argue that the more (less) the
conditions that are satisfied, the lower (higher) the amenability of a given job to be carried out
at home. For example, according to our criteria, a job that satisfies three conditions would be
less amenable to home-based-work than one that satisfies only one or two of those conditions.
Accordingly, we also exploit categorical variables describing the intensity of different tasks,
instead of transforming them into binary outcomes. While this approach still relies on the
assumption that all characteristics related to the probability of working from home have the
same weight, it exploits more information than a binary approach.
5. We use four groups of tasks to assess jobs' amenability to WFH. First, we use measures of
physical intensity and manual work to capture tasks that are more likely to be location-specific—
because they require handling large items or use specific equipment, for example—and cannot
be done at home. Second, we use measures of F2F-intensive tasks such as those that involve
supervision or contact with the public. Third, we create an index of ICT use at work, to reflect
the fact that while some jobs may require substantial F2F intensity, some of such tasks can be
carried out using ICT and do not necessarily have to be done in-person. Finally, and in contrast
to existing studies, we also exploit information on having an internet connection at home as an
important factor to determine the likelihood of a remote setup. This is important since workers
in developing countries who may use ICT and have internet connectivity at the workplace, do
 not necessarily have access to the same resources at home. Another reason why we estimate
the amenability—and not the fraction—of jobs that can be performed remotely for such a large
set of countries is that several of the surveys were collected circa 2012, when internet
connectivity was significantly lower than today. However, under the assumption that relative
connectivity across countries or types of workers remained stable, our estimates can still be
used to compare the WFH measures across these categories.
6. We use three data sets covering 53 countries at different levels of development to estimate our
WFH measure (see Table 1). First, we use the Surveys of Adult Skills of PIAAC (Programme for
the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) for 35 countries. This survey collects
information about working-age individuals and covers both rural and urban areas. Second, we
use the STEP (Skills Towards Employability and Productivity) surveys for 15 developing
countries.5 The surveys are representative of urban areas (except Sri Lanka and the Lao People's
Democratic Republic, which included both urban and rural areas) and collect information about
working-age individuals. Finally, we use the Labor Market Panel Surveys (LMPS) for three
countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, namely the Arab Republic of
Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. These are standard labor force surveys that, in addition to the typical
labor market information, also collect data about specific tasks carried out at work. Our final
sample for all three data sets includes employed individuals ages 16 to 64 years.
7. Work from home (WFM):
 8. Our findings also shed light on the importance of using task measures that vary at the individual
level instead of at the occupation level. A simple decomposition shows that less than half of the
variation in the WFH -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 MEX PER ECU TUR CHL RUS GRC KAZ ITA IRL
POL USA ESP NZL SVK SVN LTU KOR CZE GBR AUT SGP JPN FRA DEU EST ISR CAN HUN SWE DNK
NOR FIN BEL NLD 13 index is explained by variation between 4-digit ISCO occupations (see Table
A 2 in the appendix). Most of the variation in the tasks related to WFH takes place within
narrowly defined occupations.

Irlacher, M. and Koch, M., 2021. Working from home, wages, and regional inequality in the light of
COVID-19. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 241(3), pp.373-404.

It is not relevant in terms of databases (the papers use Germany's data). However, it highlights
that remote workers had a positive wage premium before the pandemic (after controlling for
everything in a Mincer regression).
This might not be a huge problem because we can examine how the wage premium changes
before and after the pandemic. Also, I think we should check for being able to work remotely and
for individual characteristics such as level of English.

Feenstra, R.C., 2017. Statistics to measure offshoring and its impact (No. w23067). National Bureau of
Economic Research.

The paper has an intuitive model that discusses the differences between an H-O model and an
offshoring model.

1. The story for the 1990s and later is quite different. There has continued to be an increase in the
relative wage of skilled workers in U.S. manufacturing, but the relative employment of these
workers has sometimes fallen. That finding is strongly suggestive of the offshoring of service
activities, whereby the more routine service activities are sent overseas. This new form of
offshoring can be explained by Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008). Their model allows for the
offshoring the tasks performed by low-skilled labor, but allows for the offshoring of tasks that
use high-skilled labor, like service tasks, as is needed to explain the more recent empirical
observations for the U.S. In the associated empirical work, O*NET data are typically used to
measure the tradability of tasks which, in addition to the imported input share, becomes
another “first generation” statistic used to measure the impact of offshoring.
2. The share of intermediate inputs in costs can be constructed with publically-available data only
by using the so-called proportionality assumption, whereby an input used in an industry has the
same ratio of imports to domestically-sourced value as does the economy as a whole. That
assumption has been criticized (e.g. Housman et al., 2011), and can be overcome by having
either firm-level values of imported inputs, or price-based measures of imported input use.
These improved statistics are particularly important when evaluating whether offshoring leads
to real losses for low-skilled labor, beyond just changes in the relative wage. In Feenstra and
Hanson (1996), the possibility of real losses depends on whether the efficiency gains from
offshoring dominate the shift in relative wages away from that factor. So to evaluate the real
gains and losses, we need a good estimate of the efficiency gains from offshoring, as the price
measures help to provide.
3. In a world with globalized production, the share of inputs that are imported becomes especially
difficult to measure when goods cross border multiple times. To give an example, a U.S import
from China might contain U.S. value-added. This concern has led to “second generation”
measures of offshoring developed from global input-output tables. Measures such as the foreign
value-added in exports (Hummels et al., 2001; Johnson and Noguera, 2012, 2016; Koopmans et
al., 2014; Los et al., 2016) have been proposed to indicate the extent to which countries are tied
into global supply chains. We review these measures and give an application to the “China
shock”, i.e. to the dramatic rise in Chinese exports following its entry to the World Trade
Organization in 2001. We measure the extent to which different countries have shared in this
export increase through their value-added in China. We further use the global input-output
 framework to develop a new price-based measure of global offshoring, which extends the
effective rate of protection on imports to apply to exported goods.
4. DURING 1990s another hypothesis appeared in the US. Offshoring tradable task (services)…
This is done with the O*NET -> That outcome can arise in the offshoring model of Grossman and
Rossi-Hansberg (2008), provided that we focus on the offshoring of high-skilled labor tasks
rather than low-skilled tasks. In their model, offshoring of high-skilled labor acts just like a high-
skilled-labor-saving innovation. The offshoring of high-skilled tasks, which we are thinking of as
service activities, leads to an increase in the relative wage of high-skilled labor and no change in
the relative wage of low-skilled labor.5 Furthermore, such offshoring will reduce demand for
skilled labor, at given industry outputs, as we have seen occurred in the United States during the
1990s. So an important contribution of Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg’s model is that it gives us
a robust way to model this service offshoring in addition to the low-skilled offshoring of the
1980s. The rich specification of offshoring costs that are built into the model allow for a wide
array of outcomes, beyond those in Feenstra and Hanson (1996, 1997).
5. In order to develop his “tradability” index, Crinò relied on the O*NET database which provides
information on job characteristics for 812 occupations. Ebenstein et al. (2014), Grossman and
Rossi-Hansberg (2006), Liu and Trefler (2011), Odenski (2012, 2014) and Wright (2014) all find
evidence that these O*NET characteristics make a difference for measuring the effects of
offshoring in the United States. Wright (2014) constructs an index of offshorability from the
O*NET data and test whether the extent of low-skilled (production) jobs and highskilled (non-
production) job loss responds differently in industries that have greater offshorability: while
more low-skilled jobs are lost when the tasks done in an industry are more routine, the opposite
occurs for high-skilled jobs. That hypothesis is strongly confirmed in his results, and in fact, the
gain of high-skilled jobs more than offsets the loss in low-skilled jobs. Adding together these two
effects, he concludes that: “the aggregate effect of offshoring is estimated to have led to a
cumulative increase in aggregate employment of 2.6% over the period 2001 to 2007, a relatively
minor effect” (p. 76).
6. To summarize our discussion so far, by using the share of inputs that are imported to measure
offshoring, it was possible to explain the pattern of wage movements found in the United States
and other countries during the 1980s. For the 1990s and later periods, the offshoring of service
activities (using nonproduction labor) became more important, and then it becomes necessarily
to measure the offshorability of tasks using O*NET data. Are we to conclude that these first-
generation measures of offshoring and its impact are adequate enough? Or are there important
questions that are left unexplained by these statistics?
In the remainder of this paper we lean towards the second of these statements: while the
phenomenon of offshoring has been firmly integrated into both trade theory and its empirical
implementation, there are important questions not addressed by the studies we have reviewed.
The first and perhaps most important of these is the welfare impact of offshoring, especially for
low-skilled labor. Feenstra and Hanson (1996) examine this issue in theory, and conclude that
while the relative wage of low-skilled workers fall in both countries, their real wages need not
fall. Low-skilled workers in the home country are the most disadvantaged by the offshoring, but
nevertheless, it is possible that they gain due to lower prices of the final good. Whether or not
 low-skilled labor loses depends on whether the efficiency gains from offshoring dominate the
shift in relative wages away from that factor. So to evaluate the real gains and losses, we need a
good estimate of the efficiency gains from offshoring. A second very important issue is to
improve the measures of offshoring itself. As we have noted, the statistic introduced by
Feenstra and Hanson (1999) was the share of imported intermediate inputs in costs. That
measure relies on the proportionality assumption, whereby the ratio of imports to domestically-
purchased inputs is assumed to be the same in every industry, and so the economy-wide ratio
(as obtained from a domestic input-output table) is used for every industry. The validity of this
assumption is explored by Feenstra and Jensen (2012) for the United States and by Winkler and
Milberg (2012) for Germany, and the latter authors especially question its accuracy. Proponen
distintas medidas que tienen en cuenta el efecto en los precios, pero me parece que no van a
donde nosotros queremos (serían los indicadores de “segunda generación” de offshoring y son
para ver ganancias de bienestar. Nuestro punto es previo y es el efecto sobre salarios y
salarios relativos.
7. From these databases, measures of offshoring more complex than the simple share of imported
intermediate inputs have been proposed, and we refer to these as “second generation”
statistics. Specifically, the domestic value-added in exports and its counterpart, the foreign
value-added in exports (Hummels et al., 2001; Johnson and Noguera, 2012, 2016; Koopmans et
al., 2014; Los et al., 2016), can be constructed to indicate the extent to which countries are tied
into global supply chains.9

Blinder, A. S. (2009). How many US jobs might be offshorable?. World Economics, 10(2), 41.

This is one of the important papers in the literature. He use O*NET. He provide the complete
ranking in the appendix (291 occupations).

1. More specifically, and subject to many caveats that will be developed later, this paper provides a
ranking of all occupations in the 2004 US workforce by their ‘offshorability’. It then uses this
index to offer several new, and hopefully more accurate, estimates of the number of jobs that
are potentially vulnerable to offshoring. It also shows, as Blinder (2006) had speculated, that the
degree of ‘offshorability’ of an occupation is virtually uncorrelated with either its educational
requirements or its current median wage.
2. The distinction between personal and impersonal services is closely related but not identical to
the one emphasised by Autor et al. (2003) – namely, how rule-based (and thus how susceptible
to computerisation) a task is. Other things being equal, jobs that can be broken down into
simple, routinisable tasks are easier to offshore than jobs requiring complex thinking, judgement
and human interaction. However, a wide variety of complex tasks that involve high levels of skill
and a great deal of human judgement can also be offshored with modern telecommunication
facilities. Think, for example, of statistical analysis, computer programming, manuscript editing
and security analysis, to name just a few. I believe the personal/impersonal distinction is more
germane to the offshoring issue than is the question of routinisability – although the two criteria
do overlap.
3. Fifth, this paper creates and presents a two-digit ‘offshorability’ index number for each of 817
occupations. But the scale is ordinal, not cardinal. For example, by assigning an index number of
100 to keyboard data entry and an index number of 95 to medical transcription, I do not mean
to imply that transcription is 5% less offshorable than data entry – whatever that might mean. I
only mean to assert that data entry is more offshorable than medical transcription. The reader
should therefore not think that, say, the ‘distance’ between 95 and 100 is, in any meaningful
sense, smaller than the distance between 95 and 87. Nor should such numbers be interpreted as
probabilities that various occupations will in fact be offshored. Sixth, and finally, the rankings
presented below are largely subjective rather than objective. I would have preferred, and
originally set out to create, a purely objective ranking – as Kletzer (2006) did. But I concluded
that this was impossible to do in any sensible way. Nonetheless, as a point of reference, I
present an alternative, purely objective, ranking of occupations in three ‘cross-checks’ below,
where I compare it with my preferred subjective ranking. As will be seen, the correlation
between the two is quite low.
4. My own hopes of using the job descriptions in the O*NET database to create a more reasonable
objective ranking of occupations were quickly dashed by considerations such as the following.
Two key defining characteristics of jobs that cannot be offshored are (a) that the job must be
performed at a specific US work location (e.g. working on a farm or at an amusement park) and
(b) that the job requires face-to-face personal communication and/or contact with end users of
the service (e.g. a taxi driver or a surgeon). Regarding the latter, one of the many ‘work
activities’ included in the O*NET database (explained further below) is ‘communicating with
persons outside the organisation’. That sounds promising – until you realise that such
communication can be ‘in person, in writing, or by telephone or email’, and that O*NET rates
this work activity as an important component of such highly-offshorable jobs as editor and
telemarketer. A human being, of course, understands that communications with an editor are
most likely to be via email and communications with a telemarketer are certainly telephonic. A
computer does not.
The next step was to assign a specific two-digit number to each occupation in Categories I, II and III. 22
As suggested already, we based these rankings on our own knowledge of what makes a service personal,
and on information relevant to that point found in the O*NET database. In particular, several of the
O*NET work activities mentioned earlier suggest a strong need for face-to-face contact with end users.
O*NET also rates the importance of these activities (and others) to the occupation. When O*NET
assigned high importance to work activities that define personally delivered services, we gave that
occupation a low ranking on the 0-to-100 offshorability scale. To illustrate our procedures, consider two
occupations with which most readers will have at least some acquaintance: financial analysts and sales
managers. O*NET lists the following as the three most important tasks that financial analysts perform on
the job (I abbreviate slightly):

1. ‘Assemble spreadsheets and draw charts and graphs, using computer’

2. ‘Analyse financial information to produce forecasts for use in making decisions’

3. ‘Maintain knowledge and stay abreast of developments’.

These and other items that rank high on O*NET’s list do not suggest much need for physical presence.
But, as mentioned earlier, work activities are more useful because they are directly comparable from
one occupation to another.

According to O*NET, the five most important work activities for financial analysts (with importances in
parentheses) are: analysing data or information (96), getting information (94), interacting with
computers (92), processing information (92), and communicating with supervisors, peers or
subordinates (87). None of these is a hallmark of personal service. And the work activities that point
most strongly towards face-to-face interactions – such as establishing and maintaining interpersonal
relationships (84), coordinating the work of others (62), selling, or influencing others (62), assisting and
caring for others (40), and performing for or working directly with the public (28) – are assigned less
importance. On this basis, we assigned an offshorability index of 76 to financial analysts, placing this
occupation right at the borderline of Categories I and II. In consequence, financial analyst jobs will be
rated as potentially offshorable under any reasonable definition

Jensen, J.B. and Kletzer, L.G., 2010. Measuring tradable services and the task content of offshorable
services jobs. In Labor in the new economy (pp. 309-335). University of Chicago Press.\

Similar to others. They use O*NET

OLD PAPERS OF OFFSHORING:

They used intermediate goods imports divided by total production (by industries) to measure
offshorability.

Another measure is by the total employment of foreign affiliates among multinational U.S. firms,
separated into high- and low-income affiliate locations, as collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis
(BEA) (Ebenstein et al, 2014).

Some examples

Baumgarten, D., Geishecker, I. and Görg, H., 2013. Offshoring, tasks, and the skill-wage
pattern. European Economic Review, 61, pp.132-152.

Hummels, D., Jørgensen, R., Munch, J. and Xiang, C., 2014. The wage effects of offshoring: Evidence
from Danish matched worker-firm data. American Economic Review, 104(6), pp.1597-1629.

Hummels, D., Munch, J.R. and Xiang, C., 2018. Offshoring and labor markets. Journal of Economic
Literature, 56(3), pp.981-1028.

Ebenstein, A., Harrison, A., McMillan, M. and Phillips, S., 2014. Estimating the impact of trade and
offshoring on American workers using the current population surveys. Review of Economics and
Statistics, 96(4), pp.581-595.