Nov
15
Wednesday
Unequal Productivity Gains in Urban China
This seminar is part of the Department of Economics Seminar Series 2017-18. The seminars are open to all - no registration necessary. If you would like to receive email notification of the Department’s seminars, please send your request to Kim.Edmunds.1@city.ac.uk.
Abstract
Speaker: Professor Sylvie Démurger (CNRS, GATE-LSE)
We estimate urbanisation effects in China for various groups of workers identified by their skill level and Hukou (migration) status.
Considering both city and city-industry characteristics allows us to better disentangle agglomeration economies, human capital and migrant externalities, and substitution effects within the local production function. Location matters for Chinese workers' earnings. High-skilled urban workers experience large gains due to agglomeration effects, a strong rural migrant externality at the city level and a smaller human capital externality at the city-industry level. Low-skilled urban workers also benefit from agglomeration effects and from the presence of migrants but to a lower extent.
Rural migrants are less impacted and do not gain from agglomeration except through market access. They exert a negative impact on the already set up migrants' earnings at the city-industry level. But they benefit from a human capital externality at both the city and city-industry levels, and from a migrant externality at the city level.