Outward FDI and Its Impact on the Home Country's Employment

In this paper I investigate the effect of outward FDI on the employment in developed countries in the period 2005 up to and including 2011. Panel data from the OECD and the International Labor Organization is used to measure FDI outflows and employment for a sample of 24 western countries. After estimating OLS regressions I find supportive results for the existing literature were it is stated that FDI outflows result in higher employment via an interaction effect with a country's export. My results also suggest that the ratio of high-skilled labor to low-skilled increases after an increase in outward FDI, which means a change in the labor composition. However after a robustness check on county and year fixed-effects I conclude that all results are specific per country and depend on the conditions of the current time period.