講座主題：The Gains from Trade from Rural-Urban Migration

主講嘉賓：李明香港中文大學（深圳）經管學院

講座時間：2024年9月13日周五14:00

講座地點：bevictor伟德官网學院南路校區學術會堂606

嘉賓簡介：

香港中文大學（深圳）經管學院經濟學助理教授，賓夕法尼亞大學經濟學博士、北京大學經濟學學士，研究領域為微觀實證、政治經濟學和中國經濟。研究論文曾發表于Urban Studies、Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly等國内外學術期刊。

講座内容簡介：We combine a unique collection of microdata from China with a natural experiment to investigate the extent to which reductions in rural-urban migration costs increase flows of trade and investment and the underlying channels. We find that increases in worker eligibility for urban residence registration (Hukou) across origin-destination pairs lead to significant increases in rural-urban exports, imports, capital inflows and outflows, both in terms of bilateral transaction values and the number of unique buyer-seller matches. These effects are more pronounced among bilateral connections that are initially less integrated and rural origins with lower initial levels of economic development. We then use our estimates to quantify the implications of China’s recent Hukou reforms on urban migration market access and the resulting gains in trade market access from reductions in buyer-seller matching frictions due to migration. We find that a 10% increase in a rural county’s urban migration market access on average leads to a 2% increase in the region’s trade market access. We also find that these additional gains from migration were on average larger among the urban destinations of the Hukou reforms compared to the rural origins, thus reinforcing incentives for rural-urban migration in spatial equilibrium.