Do Migrant Workers Squeeze the Employment Opportunities of Local Citizens?

Yan Pin, Yuan Xin

Journal of Finance and Economics Vol. 43, Issue 01, pp. 51 - 62 (2017)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.2017.01.005

Abstract

The increase in inclusive urban employment is the important content of the realization of urbanization development, and heterogenous migrants will have different effects on the employment opportunities of local citizens. Using the dynamic monitoring data, this paper analyzes the employment inclusion of urban labor market according to skill levels of labor force, industries they belong to and the inflow period, and measures the role of factors like human capital in the employment process of heterogenous migrants. It arrives at the conclusions as follows:firstly, in general, the differentiated human capital replaces the traditional barriers to the entry to industries and becomes a major factor affecting access to employment; secondly, using the instrumental variables, the estimation of employment determination model of labor groups shows that the employment rates of urban local labor force will decrease by 0.04-1.99 percentage points for the increase in the proportion of migrant workers by 10%, indicating that migrant workers have unobvious effects on the employment rates of urban local low-skilled labor but significant shocks to the employment rates of urban local high-skilled labor, which is especially obvious in some industries with high entry barriers; thirdly, the inclusion of high-skilled labor in urban labor market is significantly lower than the one of low-skilled labor, and there is higher substitution between high-skilled labor; fourthly, compared with the employment rates of local labor, migrant workers as new entrants have the greater effect on the employment rates of migrant workers as pre-entrants, and this effect also rises with the improvement of education degree. Therefore, while perfecting employment market, it should formulate more targeted talent cultivation mechanism and introduction measures in the pre and post links of employment.

Keywords

employment squeeze; human capital; substitution elasticity