Skills and the city in China

Jianyong Fan, Nian Liu and Wei Tang

Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2025, vol. 111, issue C

Abstract: This paper examines the spatial distribution and urban wage premiums of skills in China using both population censuses and labor surveys. We document an increasing concentration and urban wage premiums of occupations requiring more cognitive tasks. In large cities, the quality of cognitive skill matching between workers and occupations is significantly enhanced. Additionally, we observe stronger learning effects for workers with higher cognitive skills in these cities. However, we do not detect an urban premium for workers with higher social skills. Instead, the returns to individual social skills are more pronounced in cities with weaker institutional environments.

Keywords: Cognitive skills; Social skills; Agglomeration economies; Urban wage premium; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 R12 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046224001133
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:regeco:v:111:y:2025:i:c:s0166046224001133

DOI: 10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2024.104082

Access Statistics for this article

Regional Science and Urban Economics is currently edited by D.P McMillen and Y. Zenou

More articles in Regional Science and Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().