Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-1-2019
Publication Title
Journal of International Economics
Abstract
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 difference-in-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.
Keywords
Hukou, Immigration, Internal migration, Trade policy uncertainty
Volume
120
First Page
126
Last Page
144
DOI
10.1016/j.jinteco.2019.04.002
ISSN
00221996
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.
Recommended Citation
Facchini, Giovanni; Liu, Maggie Y.; Mayda, Anna Maria; and Zhou, Minghai, "China's “Great Migration”: The Impact of the Reduction in Trade Policy Uncertainty" (2019). Economics: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eco_facpubs/55
Comments
Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.