Abstract
People’s demands for a better environment have become increasingly strong, and the construction of ecological civilization has risen to the national level of strategic decision making. This paper studies the relationship between city ecological environment and labor mobility decision-making from the micro-individual perspective by matching the latest online resumes micro-big data with the ecological environment index data of 279 cities in China. By estimating a conditional logit model, we find that job seekers are more willing to move to the city with better ecological environment during the job transaction process. The heterogeneity results suggest that the higher the education level and the older the age is, the more sensitive the female are to the city’ ecological environment when switching the workplace. Combined with empirical conclusions, this paper argues that the government in China can open a new way in the competition of labor resources through urban ecological civilization construction and reserve high-quality “fuel” for accelerating economic transformation and achieving high-quality development.
Highlights
People’s demands for a better environment have become increasingly strong, and the construction of ecological civilization has risen to the national level of strategic decision making
As mentioned by Moretti and Neidell (2011), the states and cities compete based on income and corporate tax rates, labor, and environmental regulations, which implies that the city-level environment quality should be highly related to the labor supply [12]
As the economic development level of China and the income level of labors have increased, labors may pay more attention to life quality, and their migration decisions may be increasingly affected by city environment quality
Summary
People’s demands for a better environment have become increasingly strong, and the construction of ecological civilization has risen to the national level of strategic decision making. The contribution of this paper to the current literature is threefold It adds both to the city environment literature and migration incentives literature by highlighting the importance of cities’ environment situation to workers in China. By combining individual-level micro-big data from online resumes with city level data, we obtain credible information on personal attributes and locational preference of job seekers. This unique dataset enables us to conduct unprecedented analyses at the level of individual job seekers, by differentiating the attractiveness of a city’s ecological environment among various subgroups of interest.
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