Do Employers Prefer Migrant Workers? Evidence from a Chinese Job Board

Abstract

We study urban, private sector Chinese employers' preferences between workers with and without a local permanent residence permit (hukou) using callback information from an Internet job board. We find that these employers prefer migrant workers to locals who are identically matched to the job's requirements; these preferences are strongest in jobs requiring lower levels of education and offering low pay. While migrant-native payroll tax differentials might account for some of this gap, we argue that the patterns are hard to explain without some role for a migrant productivity advantage in less skilled jobs. Possible sources of this advantage include positive selection of nonlocals into migration, negative selection of local workers into formal search for unskilled private sector jobs, efficiency wage effects related to unskilled migrants' limited access to the urban social safety net, and intertemporal labor and effort substitution by temporary migrants that makes them more desirable workers.

The role of China’s household registration system in the urban-rural income differential

“…Compared to rural hukou holders, individuals without a reported hukou are also more likely to not be living in rural villages. If individuals who do not report a hukou are predominantly urban migrants, this pattern is consistent with the possibility of positive selection of non-locals into migration as discussed in Kuhn and Shen (2015).…”

“…The CHNS is one of the few data sets that records it, yet using the hukou variable is problematic. 12 According to CHNS representatives, some misclassi…cation of hukou may be present due to city expansion and redistricting, surveyor error, and data entry error. While we have no indication that errors are systematic, misclassi…cation of hukou status magni…es attenuation bias in individual …xed-e¤ects regression estimates compared to estimates without individual …xed-e¤ects (Freeman, 1984).…”

Analyzing discrimination in recruitment: A guide and best practices for resume studies

“…In some jobs, a specific minority group may suffer from a high degree of discrimination, because the stereotypes that recruiters have about this group do not fit with the job requirements. In contrast, for some other jobs, a specific minority group might be even advantaged, because the stereotypes that recruiters have about this group fit well to the job requirements (Kuhn & Shen, 2015).…”

Does marital status affect how firms interpret job applicants’ un/employment histories?

“…The experiment described here is based on a dynamic and increasingly important and rapidly growing segment of China's labor market-its internet job board sector. A broad range of Chinese firms embraces the boards, which tend to serve well-educated individuals (Kuhn and Shen, 2015). In China, many millions of applications are submitted on a daily basis to jobs advertised on its internet job boards [5].…”

“…A broad range of Chinese firms embrace the boards, which tend to serve well-educated individuals (Kuhn and Shen, 2015 The experimental design also includes variations in other observable productivity-related factors. The layout of the Chinese Internet job boards allows the uploading of up to 4 variations of each candidate's resume/profile and, once uploaded, allows for the choice of a particular version to submit to a particular job 9 Feasibility of implementation dictated the location choices here.…”