Do Employers Prefer Migrant Workers? Evidence from a Chinese Job Board

Peter Kuhn and Kailing Shen

No 21675, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study urban, private sector Chinese employers’ preferences between workers with and without a local permanent residence permit (hukou) using callback information from an Internet job board. We find that these employers prefer migrant workers to locals who are identically matched to the job’s requirements; these preferences are strongest in jobs requiring lower levels of education and offering low pay. While migrant-native payroll tax differentials might account for some of this gap, we argue that the patterns are hard to explain without some role for a migrant productivity advantage in less skilled jobs. Possible sources of this advantage include positive selection of nonlocals into migration, negative selection of local workers into formal search for unskilled private sector jobs, efficiency wage effects related to unskilled migrants’ limited access to the urban social safety net, and intertemporal labor and effort substitution by temporary migrants that makes them more desirable workers.

JEL-codes: J71 O15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-tra
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published as Peter Kuhn & Kailing Shen, 2015. "Do employers prefer migrant workers? Evidence from a Chinese job board," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, vol 4(1).

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