Micro Income Effects of An Opportunity Fairness Environment:Evidence from Migration Behavior
Promoting social fairness and justice is an important manifestation of the core values of socialism.President Xi Jinping emphasized that comprehensively deepening reforms must take promoting social fairness and justice and im-proving people's well-being as the starting point and goal.The"fairness of opportunity"emphasized in the report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China(CPC)is an important way to achieve social fairness and jus-tice,which helps individuals achieve higher-quality and fuller employment.Opportunity fairness means that individual de-velopment is less influenced by their parents and depends more on their abilities and efforts,and the distribution of hu-man capital and income returns have a fairer market environment.It is not only about fairness but also about efficiency,which is crucial to high-quality economic development and the improvement of people's living standards.However,there remains a lack of sufficient theoretical explanation and micro-evidence on the impact of an opportunity fairness environ-ment on economic efficiency,especially micro-individual income levels.To test the income effect of the opportunity fairness environment,it is necessary to use the exogenous changes of the opportunity fairness environment to identify its impact on individual income.The large-scale population migration since China's reform and opening up provides a quasi-natural experiment for this paper to test the impact of the environment of opportunity fairness on individual income.This paper uses the micro-data set formed by matching the 1％population sam-pling survey data in 2005 and the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey(CLDS)with the urban absolute intergenerational mobility data and uses for reference of Chetty & Hendren(2018)and Hull(2018)to construct a causal identification strat-egy based on population migration.Using the dual differences in migration decisions across different urban groups and the length of residence in new cities,this paper identifies the micro-level impact of the urban opportunity fairness environ-ment on individual income levels.This paper comes to the following conclusions.First of all,the opportunity fairness en-vironment has a significant contact effect on individual income and this contact effect has good continuity and homogene-ity with the increase of residence time in the new environment.This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests.Secondly,the heterogeneity analysis shows that there is a significantly positive contact effect among individuals who move to areas with fairer opportunities,while there is a significantly negative contact effect among individuals who move to areas with more unfair opportunities.At the same time,this positive contact effect of opportunity fairness is more prominent in individuals who have a young age,high levels of education,and urban household registration,and are in highly skilled industries and non-state-owned sectors.Thirdly,the mechanism analysis shows that the opportunity fairness environment significantly promotes the integration of individuals,and makes the employers less likely to exclude immi-grants and the job search channels more market-oriented,which will bring about a positive contact effect.These indicate that building an urban environment with opportunity fairness is not only conducive to fairness and justice but also an im-portant way to optimize the allocation of urban human capital and improve the income of residents.The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows.Firstly,it explores the income effect of the opportunity fair-ness environment from a micro perspective,providing micro evidence on how a city's opportunity fairness environment affects residents'income,and proves its importance to social fairness,justice and economic efficiency.Secondly,it con-structs a causal identification framework based on the migration identification strategy to overcome the endogenous bias caused by the self-selection of migration behavior and identify the average annual contact effect of the opportunity fair-ness environment on residents'income.Thirdly,it uses adult non-household migration samples to explore whether indi-viduals can obtain economic benefits from a fairer environment through migration in the case of household registration re-strictions in China.It not only has a stronger explanatory power for China's practical problems but also provides a factual basis for guiding the formulation of relevant decisions on migration or talent assistance.Fourthly,the conclusion of this paper proves that individuals may choose to move to areas with fairer opportunities out of economic rationality,thus re-vealing the internal economic logic of individuals moving to areas with fairer opportunities.
Opportunity FairnessMigration Identification StrategyIntergenerational MobilityResident Income
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