Online footprints of workforce migration and economic implications

Xiaoqian Hu, Jichang Zhao, Hong Li and JunJie Wu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, vol. 528, issue C

Abstract: Workforce migration plays a strong role in reallocating productive resources and provides important clues for understanding socio-economic dynamics. In this paper, we demonstrate that like a natural shock, the Spring Festival in China culturally drives workforce to travel between workplaces and hometowns, and hence the resulting trajectories in online social media open an unparallelled window to explore laws in nation-wide workforce migration. To understand the dynamics behind workforce migration between Chinese cities, a prediction model is built by profiling the tradeoff between interest articulation and cost elusion in migration decision. Interesting migration patterns are further revealed and economic implications beyond these patterns, like the filter effect of labour market and the agglomeration effect of core cities, are fully explored, which is of great help to understand different roles of Chinese cities in their own and regional economic developments. To our best knowledge, our work is among the few studies that can leverage the full data in a social media platform for comprehensive investigation.

Keywords: Workforce migration; Social media; Gravity model; Regional economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437119308908
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

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:eee:phsmap:v:528:y:2019:i:c:s0378437119308908

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2019.121497

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().