Tale of Two Cities in the Era of High-speed Rail: The Siphon Effect of Employee Mobility in Emerging Industry
CAO Chunfang, MA Xinxiao
School of Business/Center for Accounting, Finance and Institutions, Sun Yat-Sen University; Management College/China Business Working Capital Management Research Center, Ocean University of China
Summary:
The development of urban agglomerations led by central cities is the key to China's regional coordinated development strategy in the new era. Emerging industries are an important guiding force in supply-side structural reform and economic and social development. How to realize the full allocation of talents in emerging industries within the urban agglomeration has therefore become the core content of building a new development pattern. Studies have shown that factors such as wages, personal growth opportunities, and housing prices affect employee mobility, but more fundamentally, transportation improvement provides possibilities for employee mobility. Besides, compared with the labor force of traditional manufacturing industries, the labor force of emerging industries has the characteristics of rich knowledge or skill, rational thinking, and open-mindedness, and is more susceptible to transportation improvement when deciding workplace. On this basis, the opening of high-speed rail indisputably promotes the optimization of regional resource allocation and the development of enterprises. But it may also have a siphoning effect in theory, that is, larger cities can better attract talents and natural resources from the surrounding area, leading to severer resource outflow and limited development of small cities. A large number of news reports have provided cases for this argument. China's high-speed rail construction has created many “one-hour high-speed rail circles”, shortening the time distance between cities, and making small-city talents seek employment in nearby big cities along the line more common. For example, after the high-speed rail was opened, employees in small cities go to work in big cities in the morning and return to live in small cities after work, creating a “Tale of Two Cities” in the morning and evening. The integration of resources such as population and land within the region has become possible. In this context, this paper takes Chinese A-share listed companies from 2003 to 2020 as a sample to discuss the siphoning effect of employee mobility. It finds that after the opening of the high-speed rail, the employee mobility of emerging industry companies is differentiated according to the size of the city. Obtaining employees has become easier for emerging industry companies in large cities, but has become more difficult for companies in small cities, which indicates that the employee mobility of emerging industries has a siphoning effect of more market-oriented allocation in urban agglomerations. This conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. Further research shows that the outflow of employees from small cities is due to the ease of obtaining employment opportunities in big cities and the relieved pressure on housing prices after the opening of high-speed rail, but it is not affected by high wages in big cities. Finally, the aforementioned siphon effect has spatial limitations, it mainly exists in small cities within 2 hours of high-speed rail travel from big cities. This paper makes contributions in the following three aspects. First, the labor force of emerging industries has characteristics that are obviously different from those of traditional industries, this paper uses it to study the siphoning effect of employee mobility after the opening of high-speed rail, which expands academic research on the development of emerging industries from the labor force level. Second, based on the perspective of talent acquisition in emerging industries, this paper finds the heterogeneous consequences of transportation improvement on employee mobility, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of how transportation improvement affects labor mobility. Third, this paper studies the siphoning effect of employee mobility in emerging industries under the city size heterogeneity and expands on the microeconomic consequences of the opening of high-speed rail. This paper has the following policy implications. In the context of the coordinated regional development strategy and the construction of a unified national market, the key to the coordinated development of infrastructure construction and emerging industries lies in the precise and differentiated competition of emerging industries in accordance with local characteristics and endowments under the high-level unified planning. Therefore, it is necessary to break through the limitations and drawbacks of single urban planning, identify endowments and make overall planning from the height of each urban agglomeration in the region. This paper finds that the construction of transportation infrastructure represented by the opening of high-speed rail helps the talent elements of emerging industries flow with market orientation among cities, which is of great significance for the overall planning of the functional positioning of each city within the urban agglomeration and the cultivation of emerging industries.
曹春方, 马新啸. 高铁时代“双城记”:新兴产业雇员流动的虹吸效应[J]. 金融研究, 2022, 508(10): 135-152.
CAO Chunfang, MA Xinxiao. Tale of Two Cities in the Era of High-speed Rail: The Siphon Effect of Employee Mobility in Emerging Industry. Journal of Financial Research, 2022, 508(10): 135-152.
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