China's Great Migration: The impact of the reduction in trade policy uncertainty

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Facchini, Giovanni; Liu, Maggie Y.; Mayda, Anna Maria; Zhou, Minghai
• 署名单位: University of Nottingham; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Smith College; Georgetown University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of Nottingham Ningbo China
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2019.04.002
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 126-144
• 关键词: Hukou; immigration; internal migration; Trade policy uncertainty

摘要

We analyze the effect of China's integration into the world economy on workers in the country and show that one important channel of impact has been internal migration. Specifically, we study the changes in internal migration rates triggered by the reduction in trade policy uncertainty faced by Chinese exporters in the U.S. This reduction is characterized by plausibly exogenous variation across products, which we use to construct a local measure of treatment, at the level of a Chinese prefecture, following Bartik (1991). This allows us to estimate a differencein-difference empirical specification based on variation across Chinese prefectures before and after 2001. We find that prefectures facing the average decline in trade policy uncertainty experienced a 24% increase in their internal in-migration rate - this result is driven by migrants who are non-hukou, skilled, and in their prime working age. Finally, in those prefectures, working hours of native unskilled workers significantly increased, and internal migrants found employment in the places they migrated to. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.