Do Employers Prefer Migrant Workers? Evidence from a Chinese Job Board / Peter Kuhn, Kailing Shen.

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Kuhn, Peter

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w21675.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: We study urban, private sector Chinese employers' preferences between workers with and without a local permanent residence permit (hukou) using callback information from an Internet job board. We find that these employers prefer migrant workers to locals who are identically matched to the job's requirements; these preferences are strongest in jobs requiring lower levels of education and offering low pay. While migrant-native payroll tax differentials might account for some of this gap, we argue that the patterns are hard to explain without some role for a migrant productivity advantage in less skilled jobs. Possible sources of this advantage include positive selection of nonlocals into migration, negative selection of local workers into formal search for unskilled private sector jobs, efficiency wage effects related to unskilled migrants' limited access to the urban social safety net, and intertemporal labor and effort substitution by temporary migrants that makes them more desirable workers.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w21675 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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October 2015.

We study urban, private sector Chinese employers' preferences between workers with and without a local permanent residence permit (hukou) using callback information from an Internet job board. We find that these employers prefer migrant workers to locals who are identically matched to the job's requirements; these preferences are strongest in jobs requiring lower levels of education and offering low pay. While migrant-native payroll tax differentials might account for some of this gap, we argue that the patterns are hard to explain without some role for a migrant productivity advantage in less skilled jobs. Possible sources of this advantage include positive selection of nonlocals into migration, negative selection of local workers into formal search for unskilled private sector jobs, efficiency wage effects related to unskilled migrants' limited access to the urban social safety net, and intertemporal labor and effort substitution by temporary migrants that makes them more desirable workers.