Summary:
China's economy is entering a new stage of high-quality development, and with the decline of the global demographic dividend and the concurrent release of the regional demographic dividend, the competition between cities for talent and labor forces has gradually become a key focus of the new era. Thus, the study of labor force allocation now focuses on what features are used by cities to attract and retain talent. In China's new urbanization process, people-oriented features are becoming an important part of urban talent attraction and management policies, and urban features that meet consumers' various preferences and personalized needs are gradually becoming an important driver of labor mobility. The production capacity, types, and supply modes of urban services are crucial supports of urban convenience and comfort and provide many ways to improve the welfare of local workers. The increasing demand of cities for labor and the fierce competition between cities to attract talent leads to the following key questions. What role does the diversification and convenience of urban service supply play in labor migration？ What kind of talents are attracted and retained by urban service diversity？ The answers to these questions will have extensive practical significance and implications. To this end, this study analyzes the effect of urban service diversity on labor mobility from the perspective of comfort and convenience. Thus, an analysis is performed on the data of Meituan, a food-delivery company, and the data from a dynamic monitoring survey of China's floating population in 2017. To deal with the endogeneity problem, the geographical distance between a city and its provincial capital is used as the instrumental variable, and the results confirm that urban service diversity has a significant effect on labor flows. Specifically, a 1% increase in the urban service diversity of a city leads to a 3.23% reduction in the probability that floating population-associated labor will leave that city. That is, if the endogenous problems caused by individual and urban characteristics and missing variables are controlled, a higher diversity of urban services decreases the probability of labor force selection and mobility. The results of grouping regression based on age nodes and skill levels also reveal that various labor groups have different sensitivities to urban service diversity. For example, the younger population is less likely than the elderly to leave cities with a higher diversity of urban services. In addition, initial analyses show that the mobility and migration probability of the young and middle-aged labor forces decreases by 4.62% for every 1% increase in the urban service category. Furthermore, although the comfort welfare afforded by urban services is important for highly skilled workers and low-skilled workers, highly skilled workers have a greater sensitivity to such comfort welfare. We also analyze the effect of adjustments in urban and regional environments, and find that the construction of urban informatization technology and the level of marketization have a positive effect on the attraction and retention of talent via their effects on urban service diversity. That is, the construction of information technology (such as urban mobile Internet services) and increased market sophistication attracts labor to live in a city to take advantage of modern products and services, and it therefore reduces the probability of labor mobility or migration. In addition, the results show that labor flow in the central and western regions is less affected by the diversity of urban services than labor flow in the eastern regions. Specifically, the coefficient of the cross terms of age and skill level reveal that labor forces with strong ability or younger age currently prefer to stay in eastern cities. Furthermore, we find that labor flows in big cities are more sensitive to the diversity of urban services than labor flows in small and medium-sized cities, which shows that the comfort welfare represented by the diversity of urban services is an important channel by which large cities draw a population dividend from small and medium-sized cities. The results of this study have novel implications for the development of policies designed to attract and retain labor force talents, which are part of the urban competition for talent in China. In particular, as the urban economy of China is entering a new stage of high-quality development, the spatial reallocation of labor involves quantitative change in terms of scales of flow and cross-regional migration, as well as qualitative change in terms of the direction of labor structure optimization and efficiency improvements. Moreover, the advantages enjoyed by cities that stem from their ability to attract and retain a high-quality labor force depend on their offering workers a “livelihood channel” of employment and a channel of improved general comfort and welfare. Urban managers and policy designers should therefore make plans based on this reality to cultivate and develop market patterns that are more in line with individual's welfare preferences and thereby to gradually improve the quality of urban labor forces by increasing the diversity of urban service supply systems.
张文武, 余泳泽. 城市服务多样性与劳动力流动——基于“美团网”大数据和流动人口微观调查的分析[J]. 金融研究, 2021, 495(9): 91-110.
ZHANG Wenwu, YU Yongze. Urban Service Diversity and Labor Mobility: An Analysis Based on Big Data of Meituan and a Micro Survey of a Floating Population. Journal of Financial Research, 2021, 495(9): 91-110.
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