For this question, use the spreadsheet "multinational employment.xls."
(a) Recall that Slaughter made a point that over the course of his data, "for every one job that U.S. multinationals created abroad in their affiliates they created nearly two U.S. jobs in their parents." Let us see how well that pattern holds up in the data. Focus on the period 1988-2001, and calculate the ratio of U.S. jobs created by multinationals to foreign jobs created by multinationals. (''U.S. jobs created as of 2000" will be measured by the U.S. jobs as of 2000 minus the U.S. jobs as of 1988, and so on.) Could this ratio be used as an argument that the activities of foreign affiliates of U.S. multinationals are good for U.S. workers? Or could it be used by an anti globalization advocate as an argument that those activities hurt U.S. workers? Whichever you choose, show how this might be done, but write a sentence or two that might use the statistic for this purpose.
(b) Now, focus on the period 2001-2006, and do the same thing. (Once again, for this exercise "U.S. jobs created as of 2004" will be measured by the U.S. jobs as of 2004 minus US jobs as of 2001.)
(c) Now, show how U.S. multinationals' share of U.S. employment changed from 1998 to 2001, and how it changed from 2001 to 2006, and explain how those findings can be interpreted as evidence for or against a positive effect of offshoring on U.S. workers.
(d) Is the lesson one obtains from these data sensitive to the time period one uses? Explain.