Research On Labor Market Polarization

In the past few decades,labor market polarization has become a typical fact in the economic development of many developed countries.Compared to the growth of highand low-skill labor employment share or wages,medium-skill labor share of employment or wages continued to decline.The structure of both ends rise and the middle part fall like a “U” has become a basic long-term trend of European and American countries' labor market.As China continues to deepen its economic structure reform,innovation drive and technological progress are becoming the core motive of economic growth.Profound changes have also occurred in the employment and wage structure in the labor market.However,no conclusion has been drawn whether polarization has occurred in the labor market.The research on the formation mechanism of labor market polarization also lags behind.Based on the perspective of skill biased technical change and labor mobility,this article uses theoretical and empirical research methods to conduct an in-depth study on the polarization of China's labor market.The research content of this article includes seven chapters: The first chapter is the introduction which mainly introduces the basis and significance of topic selection,research ideas,research contents and possible innovation points in this paper.The second chapter is the literature and research review which comb and review centering on four aspects: the emergence,measure methods,the reason of formation and the social and economic effects of labor market polarization,and put forward the research direction and possible contribution of this article based on the review.The third chapter is the analysis of China's labor market polarization characteristics.This article classified career and labor force based on three standards: the skill level,educational level and wage level and it determines the emergence of China's labor market polarization through the statistics of all kinds of professional employment share change and the condition of average wage growth in 2003-2015.Finally,on the basis of the analysis on the national labor market polarization,it compared the regional differences of the labor market polarization in the eastern,central and western regions.The fourth chapter is about the theoretical research of polarization mechanism of labor market.This chapter refers to Autor et al.(2003)?Michaels et al.(2010),Acemoglu and Autor(2013);Lehn(2014)to build theory model,theoretical analysis of the process of capital substitution of routine tasks leading to the employment and wages of medium-skill relatively reduce under skill-biased technical change.Then by building space general equilibrium analysis model,it researches on the further development of the labor market polarization under the effect of labor mobility.Chapter 5 and chapter 6 verified the existence of the theory propositions through empirical analysis.Among them,the fifth chapter is an empirical analysis of the skill biased technical change and labor market polarization.In this paper,first of all,according to Acemoglu(2002)definition of bias for technical change,it calculate to get the technology skill bias level of technology progress in Chinese provinces(2003-2015)and confirmed that the technology progress is of high-skill bias type at the present stage in China.On this basis,it use the cross-section data of the years,CGSS2003,2006,2008,2010-2013,2015,using multiple linear regression,weighted regression and multivariate logit regression model to carry on the empirical analysis and test the effect of the skill biased technical change on the employment polarization and wage polarization.The sixth chapter is an empirical analysis of labor mobility and the labor market polarization.This chapter uses the dynamic monitoring data of the floating population from 2013 to 2015 to carry on the empirical analysis,through multiple linear regression,multiple treatment effect,multivariate logit regression model to estimate,and carry out city and regional grouping regression comparison,through the empirical analysis of labor mobility affect different skill levels of labor employment and wage change effect is analyzed.The seventh chapter summarizes the main conclusions of this article,and on the basis of it,related research prospect is put forward.Centering on the research on Chinese labor market polarization,this paper got some meaningful research conclusions:First,the trend of Chinese labor market overall and regional polarization gradually revealed.From 2003 to 2015,our country's labor market generally showed the characteristics of wage and employment polarization,and is also evident in the eastern region.There isn't evident employment polarization in the western region,but the employment share of medium-skill labor under different classification criteria is decreasing,relative wages of are constantly decreasing,the wage levels of medium-skill or low-skill labor force are very close,wages of high-skill labor rise quickly at the same time.These all proves that the trend of employment and wage polarization in the labor market of western and central region has appeared.Second,technological progress showed high-skill bias and contributed to the labor market polarization.By calculating,we found that technological progress is the high-skill bias type in each province in China from 2003 to 2015.On this basis,by constructing theoretical model and empirical test,we finally concluded that skill biased technical change significantly promoted the employment and wage polarization in China's labor market,and the effect has regional differences.High technical level and technical capital investment in eastern region has outstanding effect on the polarization.However,the central and western regions because of the restricted by technology capital input level,the impact on the labor market polarization has not yet appeared.Third,labor mobility enhancement contributed to the labor market of polarization.This paper refer to Autor(2013)space equilibrium analysis method,and add the labor mobility factors into the analysis framework,through the theoretical model and the corresponding empirical analysis,this paper found that: The so-called "Frequent shifts make a tree dead but a person prosperous",for individual workers,to expand the scope of the flow can effectively raise the wage level and employment probability and the promotion effect is particularly outstanding for high-skill and low-skill labor,that is,labor mobility enhancement has accelerated the polarization of wages and employment.This is also verified from the analysis of the urban and regional levels.The increase in the size of the permanent population in the region and the enhancement of the mobility of the labor force can significantly promote the polarization of the labor market in the region.Conversely,in small and medium-sized cities,the central and western regions have shown weaker impact on labor market polarization due to their weaker labor mobility.Finally,labor market fragmentation exacerbates the impact of employment polarization on particular labor groups.Through empirical analysis,we found that occupational gender segregation and age segregation exist in the labor market.As a result,young and middle-aged males with low qualifications have become the main labor supply for medium-skill occupations.They will be the first to be hit during employment polarization and face the risk of unemployment.At the same time,there is also geographical segmentation and urban-rural segmentation in the labor market.The probability that the inter-provincial rural-urban migrants engaged in medium-skill occupations is higher than that of urban migrants or provincial migrants,leading to an increased risk of unemployment among the groups in the process of employment polarization.