Housing Prices,Urban Innovation,and Spatial Mobility Of Labor

Since the reform and opening up,along with the rise of house prices and regional innovation,distinct differences have been presented in different regions,and the flow decisions of production factors are affected by them,which will reallocate resources,aiming to reduce the efficiency loss caused by the spatial mismatch of resources and continuously optimize regional economic development.How the rise of urban housing prices and the change of regional innovation dynamics will bring about the impact of labor mobility will be discussed in detail in this paper.On the one hand,the increase in innovation level facilitates the expansion of labor market,while on the other hand,the increase in housing price leads to the increase in the cost of living of labor.Unlike previous studies,which mostly adopt theoretical mechanisms for the effects of housing prices and innovation on labor force,this paper focuses on the decomposition of effects in the model construction,and compares the utility of different housing groups by differentiating them,and adopts a combination of micro data and macro data in the empirical evidence to confirm the proposition.This paper will adopt a new economic geography model and conduct a theoretical mechanism analysis to measure the indirect utility function by constructing the regional housing sector as well as the mobile labor factor.Since the mobility decision is influenced by the ratio of relative utilities,the relative utility function is constructed on its basis and derived for the housing and innovation variables to obtain the effect of housing price changes and regional innovation levels on the individual mobile labor force.As housing itself is also an investment good,when the housing price rises rapidly,the investment return of purchasing housing may exceed the investment return of other wealth,thus making the labor force more inclined to choose to invest in property and pursue wealth appreciation to obtain the wealth effect.We therefore argue that house prices and regional innovation have an attractive effect on labor mobility,but the positive and negative effects of their influence need to be studied in detail.In addition,utility comparisons are made in the housing sector distinguishing between investors with and without property,and theoretical propositions are derived.In the empirical evidence this paper uses the dynamic monitoring data of China’s mobile population in 2017 and the mobile population data of prefecture-level cities from 2010-2019 for supporting evidence,the study finds that(1)there is a negative attraction effect of rising house prices for the mobile labor force,and diametrically opposite crowding out and wealth effects when the rising house prices act on the labor force.The labor force without housing is only subject to the crowding-out effect,while the labor force with property investment has a positive wealth effect in addition to the negative crowding-out effect;(2)regional innovation always has an attraction effect on the labor force with property investment,and the attraction effect is significantly larger than that of the group without housing;(3)among the attraction effects of house prices and regional innovation,the negative attraction effect of house prices(3)Among the attraction effects of house price and regional innovation,the negative attraction effect of house price is much stronger than the positive effect of regional innovation on labor force,and the interaction effect of the two shows a negative attraction.The conclusion of this paper on labor mobility reflects the reality that the decreasing share of migrant workers’ employment in the more developed eastern regions has accelerated the return of labor from the central and western regions.Therefore,we should pay attention to alleviating the pressure of labor force’s housing purchase burden and cost of living,lowering the threshold of labor force settling in cities,and vigorously promoting policies such as talent introduction to fully release the attraction of regional innovation to the employed population.