The effects of rural–urban migration on corporate innovation: Evidence from a natural experiment in China

Deqiu Chen, Huasheng Gao, Jiang Luo and Yujing Ma

Financial Management, 2020, vol. 49, issue 2, 521-545

Abstract: We show that the migration of low‐skilled, rural workers to urban centers has a negative causal effect on innovation of firms in such urban centers. Our tests exploit the staggered relaxation of city‐level household registration system in China, which facilitates rural residents to migrate to cities. We find a significant decrease in innovation for firms headquartered in cities that have adopted such policies relative to firms headquartered in cities that have not. Overall, our results support the view that an abundant supply of low‐skilled workers increases the benefit of using existing low‐skilled technology and thus reduces firms’ incentive to innovate.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/fima.12280

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:finmgt:v:49:y:2020:i:2:p:521-545

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0046-3892

Access Statistics for this article

Financial Management is currently edited by William G. Christie

More articles in Financial Management from Financial Management Association International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().