Gai Qingen, Professor of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, will give a lecture entitled “Migration Costs Labor Supply Sorting and the Agricultural Productivity Gap” from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. on June 7th.
This is one of the lecture series hosted by the School of Economics, Renmin University of China (RUC). The lecture will be held in Room 729 in the Mingde Main Building. Qiao Xue, Professor of the School of Economics, RUC, will preside over the lecture.
Introduction:
Gai Qingen is a professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. He has been a visiting scholar at department of economics at University of Toronto and obtained a PhD. degree in economics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2013.His research interests are Growth and Development and the Chinese Economy.
Abstract:
We use a unique panel dataset and a policy experiment as an instrument to estimate the impact of policy-induced migration cost reductions on rural-to-urban migration and the associated increase in labor earnings for migrant workers in China. Our estimation shows that the observed labor earnings gap between agriculture and non-agriculture is mainly due to large migration costs and a large underlying productivity difference between the two sectors. Sorting plays only a minor role in accounting for the observed sectoral earnings gap. To interpret the reduced-form results, we construct a general equilibrium household model with endogenous labor supply and migration that not only is consistent with the reduced form results, but also illustrates the channel through which the policy experiment affects migration. We then estimate the general equilibrium model structurally and use the estimated model to quantify the effects of various policies on migration the labor earnings gap, aggregate productivity, and welfare.
