题目：Agglomeration and Firm Wage Inequality: Evidence from China
报告人：Mark Partridge （The Ohio State University）
主持人：朱希伟 教授 浙江大学经济学院
时间：2017年3月10日（周五） 15:30-17:00
地点：浙江大学玉泉校区经济学院418室
摘要：
China is experiencing rapid urbanization with the steady emergence of large cities, leading to policy discussions of the role of large cities in the country’s development. There is a large related literature that documents the role of city size on productivity and wage premiums. While the consensus is that agglomeration plays an important role in economic development and large cities can act as engines of economic growth, there is relatively little empirical knowledge of the effects of agglomeration on inequality. This is an important gap in the literature: given that high-productivity firms and low-productivity firms may both sort to large cities, the continuing rapid growth of large cities may further increase Chinese income inequality, which is already at high levels.
In this study, we apply panel data from a micro firm-level survey and from city-level data to investigate whether there is causal relationship between agglomeration and establishment wage dispersion in China. We not only examine the short-run linkages between city size and wage dispersion, but also assess their long-run relationship to investigate whether the effects have temporal variation. Furthermore, we explore whether the effects of city size on wage dispersion differ between coastal and inland regions to assess development’s role in forging agglomeration links. In addition, we assess this relationship for different public and private ownership structures within these two regions followed by an investigation of whether it is high-wage or low-wage workers that benefit from agglomeration. Given potential endogeneity of city size, we employ an instrumental variable regression (IV) approach.
We find strong evidence that agglomeration has positive effects on wage dispersion in the short run and negative effects in the long run. The link between agglomeration and wage dispersion is much stronger in the inland region than in the coastal region and the differing coastal/inland region results are not due to differing private/public ownership distributions. Rather, these differences appear to be due to differing stages of development. We also find that positive short-term labor demand shocks tend to increase wages relatively uniformly in the upper-half of the distribution, while long-term agglomeration effects dampen average firm wages at the top and middle of the distribution and increase relative wages for firms at the bottom.
Mark Partridge简介
美国俄亥俄州立大学农业、环境与发展经济学系教授，国际区域科学学会(RSAI)会士，RSAI候任主席（President Elect），Journal of Regional Science和Springer Briefs in Regional Science主编，主要研究区域经济发展、城乡一体化和区域劳动力市场，在American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Economic Geography等期刊发表论文100多篇。
