The role of skilled labor pool in driving firms to agglomerate: an empirical study on China's policy experiment

Agglomeration;Natural experiment

Wang, Miao

关键词: Agglomeration;    Natural experiment;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/89109/WANG-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This study aims to empirically identify agglomeration forces operating through skilled labor mobility. Specifically, this research uses a natural experiment in China regarding to skilled labor migration liberalization to examine the impact of skilled labor pool and knowledge availability on China’s industrial agglomeration. The current project centers on three progressive chapters on how skilled labor reallocation reshapes the economic geography in China. Chapter 2 estimates the response of the high-tech industrial agglomeration to high-educated/high-skilled labor migration liberalization. It finds liberalizing interregional skilled labor mobility facilitates high-tech industrial agglomeration. Chapter 3 uses a narrowly controlled dataset to construct a case study on the China’s Food Processing industry. The research question posed is whether Food Processing firms co-locate to access talent pool. It finds evidence that the skilled labor pool affected the location decision of Food Processing firms. The result supports recent literature that the food and agribusiness sector is increasingly dependent on knowledge and high technology. Chapter 4 models and tests the knowledge effect through which a skilled labor policy increases industrial agglomeration. It analyzes relationship between a sector’s heterogeneity level and knowledge efficacy. It finds that heterogeneity alone does not maximize knowledge efficacy.