Does the Income Gap Caused by Hukou Discrimination Still Exist?A Re-discussion Based on Machine Learning Methods
Changes in the supply-demand structure of China's labor market have led to a new trend in the income gap between migrant workers and urban employees,sparking increasing debates on whether Hukou-based discrimination still exists.This paper re-examines the phenomenon of Hukou-based discrimination in the income gap between migrant workers and urban employees using a doubly debiased machine learning approach.The empirical analysis reveals the following findings.(1)Migration premium interferes with the identification of Hukou-based discrimination,and the phenomenon of Hukou-based discrimination becomes more apparent after accounting for the factor of migration premium.(2)After applying the doubly debiased machine learning method to select models that better meet the conditional independence assumption,the agricultural household registration has a negative impact on the laborers'hourly wage income,the annual total income and the annual wage income,with a more significant negative effect on the hourly wage income.(3)The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition,corrected by doubly debiased machine learning,indicates that approximately 8％to 15％of the income gap between migrant workers and urban employees can be attributed to Hukou-based discrimination.(4)The Oster test confirms that the estimation of doubly debiased machine learning is more reliable than the OLS estimation,and the doubly debiased machine learning estimation and Lewbel's instrumental variable estimation under different machine learning algorithms also demonstrate the robustness of the conclusions drawn in this paper.
万方数据
