Skill Complementarity,Spatial Frictions And Urban Human Capital Distribution

The spatial distribution of human capital plays an important role in the economic development of the city.This paper uses the Chinese national census data to analyze the characteristics of the distribution of human capital.The results show that a higher proportion of high-skilled and medium-skilled population exist in large cities,which is quiet different from the empirical results of foreign literature that they found robust evidence of thick tails in large cities: large cities disproportionately attract both high-and low-skilled workers.Based on the robust facts,this paper attempts to explore the formation mechanism of urban human capital distribution and the impact of policy spatial friction on population mobility.The skill complementarity is caused by two factors,production externalities and consumer externalities.However,for a long time,academic community on the theory of complementary skills of skills has only focused on complementary production;often overlooking the complementarity of consumption levels in reality.In the basic two-sector model,this paper adds a service sector and reconstructs the three-sector spatial classification model to describe the consumption complementarity mechanism under the market mechanism,which makes up for the gap in the theoretical level of this research.The spatial frictions on the distribution of human capital in China is particularly noteworthy.This paper focuses on the spatial effects of policy friction,and roughly divides it into a population control policy represented by the household registration system and a population deconstruction policy represented by the minimum living standard,and uses the counterfactual analysis method to make a policy on the social welfare impact of the policy.Explored.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows: First,in the free-flowing situation,urban human capital presents a bilateral thick-tailed distribution,and large cities have a higher proportion of high and low skills.This shows that the complementary consumption of high and low skills in large cities exceeds the complementary effect of production between high and medium skills.Second,when there is policy friction,the human capital distribution shifts to high skill.In terms of subdivision,the household registration skills have a greater impact,which makes the human capital of the big cities flat.The minimum living standard only affects the low-skilled population,which makes the human capital distribution shift to the right.The combination of the two policies determines the distribution of urban human capital from a double-sided thick tail to a right thick tail.Finally,this paper uses the counterfactual analysis method to explore the welfare status under different policy paths.Although the household registration system has a certain positive effect,the study finds that its negative effect on the total welfare of the society is significantly higher,and this loss exceeds the utility loss brought by the minimum standard system.This paper explores the formation mechanism of human capital distribution to better understand the human capital structure of the city.The research on policy friction also provides guiding suggestions for the existing population mobility policy.