Industrial composition change in China and its effect on regional employment, quality-of-life, and migration

The dissertation consists of three related papers. The first paper, named A Dynamic Spatial Shift-Share Analysis of Regional Employment Change In China , uses the shift-share technique to analyze Chinese regional employment changes from 2003 to 2009. Different from the standard shift-share technique, the paper combines the dynamic shift-share model with the spatial shift-share model and decomposes the employment change of 9 selected industries into four effects. By studying the effects, I find that: first, employment is transferring from the primary industries and traditional service industries to the secondary industries and new emerging service industries. Second, the primary industries tend to agglomerate in northeast China, the secondary industries will move to and finally agglomerate in east coastal provinces, and the tertiary industries' agglomeration effect is relatively unclear. Third, reasonable regional division facilitates coordination and cooperation between the regions to develop the regional comparative advantage.;The second paper, named Impacts of Industrial Composition on Intercity Housing Prices And Per-capita Income Differentials: A Quality-Of-Life Analysis in China , aims to disclose the linkage between industrial composition and intercity housing prices and per-capita income differentials. It fills in the gaps of the study of quality-of-life in China by developing the topic from the perspective of industrial composition. Using aggregate panel data of 287 prefectural level Chinese cities from 2005 to 2009, which is characterized as growing labor mobility and accelerating urbanization process, we modify the Rosen-Roback hedonic model and find a statistically significant positive correlation between industrial composition and housing prices as well as per-capita income. This is the result of a mixture of productivity effects and quality-of-life effects. We further point out that housing prices grow faster than per-capita income in a city with more advanced industrial composition, which means that city contains more industries that grow faster than the national average, reflecting the willingness to pay for this amenity.;The third paper, named The Effects of Industrial Composition on Inter-provincial And Intra-provincial Migration in China, argues that the employment structure changes as the industrial composition change and the employment change in cities would cause inflows and outflows of labor. This paper examines the relationship between the employment growth attributable to the industrial composition and inter-provincial as well as intra-provincial migration. Different from previous research, industrial composition is calculated using 2-digit level industries so that more comprehensive information of industrial structure could be captured. Using the directional migration odds model and interregional migration data among 31 provincial units in 2000 and 2005, we find that the origin-destination difference in employment growth attributable to the industrial composition difference has significant negative effects on the migration odds ratio, which means that a larger difference in employment growth attributable to the industrial composition difference between two provinces would increase people's propensity to migrate intra province. It renews the previous finding that states the ambiguous relationship between industrial composition and migration.