Title: Labor Skill, Industry Structure and Migration

Speaker: Associate Professor Xiangjun Ma, University of International Business and Economics

Time: November 3th, 2017  13:30–14:45

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (College of Economics, JNU)

Abstract:

Regional migrants consist of a large share of the labor market in China. While who selects into migration has been extensively studied, there has been absence of discussion on how heterogeneous these migrants are, particularly regarding their industry choice upon migration. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between regional migrants' industry concentration and the industry structure of the source (home) province and the host city in China. Using a unique nationwide survey data of regional migrants with more than 128,000 observations in each year we find that migrants are less likely to choose industries in which their home province has comparative advantage and more likely to select into industries in which the host city has comparative advantage. To explain the empirical findings, we construct a variant of the Roy Model, which provides theoretical prediction consistent with our empirical findings.