讲座主题：The Gains from Trade from Rural-Urban Migration

主讲嘉宾：李明香港中文大学（深圳）经管学院

讲座时间：2024年9月13日周五14:00

讲座地点：澳门威斯人3775学院南路校区学术会堂606

嘉宾简介：

香港中文大学（深圳）经管学院经济学助理教授，宾夕法尼亚大学经济学博士、北京大学经济学学士，研究领域为微观实证、政治经济学和中国经济。研究论文曾发表于Urban Studies、Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly等国内外学术期刊。

讲座内容简介：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.