As China’s population ages, more older workers are participating in the labor market, including a significant number of older migrant workers moving to urban areas. However, surprisingly little research has been done on their destination city and employment patterns. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the impact of city-level and industry specialization on the employment prospects of older migrant workers. Using both individual- and city-level data, we find that unlike prime-age migrant workers, older migrant workers have higher employment probabilities in relatively less-developed lower-tier Chinese cities than in better-developed high-tier cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, or Guangzhou. This phenomenon is driven by industry specialization, particularly in the construction sector, which fosters a dense labor market and facilitates higher job-finding rates. Additionally, construction firms and real estate developers in lower-tier cities are more willing to offer better wages than those in high-tier cities, which aligns with older migrant workers’ relatively moderate education profile and wage preferences over housing costs.

This paper highlights the crucial role of land allocation mechanisms in promoting industrial agglomeration by examining China’s 2007 industrial land market reform. By introducing transparency into the land-selling process, the reform facilitated more buyers to compete for land (reflected by increased land sale prices), enabling local governments to allocate land to the most suitable users. Combining comprehensive data sets that include information on initial local industrial structure, new industrial establishments, and industrial land transactions, the empirical analysis finds that the reform significantly increased the entry of firms from industries aligned with local specialization, particularly in areas that implemented the reform more strictly. A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates a 1.3% increase in the national average total factor productivity of new entrants over three years post-reform due to a better match between new entrants and local industry specialization. Supporting evidence demonstrates the reform’s positive effect on economic growth (reflected in changes in nighttime lights), potentially through increasing local firms’ TFP.

We identify negative spillovers exerted by large, successful manufacturing plants on other local production facilities in China. A short-lived alliance between the U.S.S.R. and China led to the construction of 150 "Million-Rouble plants" in the 1950s. Our identification strategy exploits the ephemeral geopolitical context and the relative position of allied and enemy airbases to isolate exogenous variation in plant location decisions. We find a boom-and-bust pattern in hosting counties: treated counties are twice as productive as control counties in 1982, but 30% less productive in 2010. The average other establishment in treated counties is unproductive, does not innovate, and charges high markups. We find that (over)specialization limits technological spillovers. This prevents the emergence of new industrial clusters and leads to a flight of entrepreneurs.

Using a new case-level dataset we document a set of stylized facts on bankruptcy in China and study how the staggered introduction of specialized courts across Chi- nese cities affected insolvency resolution and the local economy. For identification, we compare bankruptcy cases handled by specialized versus traditional civil courts within the same city and filed in the same year. We find that specialized courts decrease case duration by 36% relative to traditional civil courts. We provide evi- dence consistent with court specialization increasing efficiency via selection of better trained judges and higher judicial independence from local politicians. We docu- ment that cities introducing specialized courts experience a relative reallocation of employment out of zombie firms-intensive sectors, as well as faster firm entry and a larger increase in average capital productivity.

We study how service trade affects structural transformation and regional patterns of specialization. Using unique Canadian trade data, we document that i) interprovincial and international trade of services have increased between 1992-2017; ii) inter-provincial trade is larger in services compared to goods; iii) structural transformation occurs from goods to tradable services, especially in tradable service-intensive provinces; and iv) there is significant regional specialization in producing goods and services across provinces. Using a spatial model of structural transformation and trade, we quantify the effects of service trade, domestic and international, on the share of the tradable-service sector and regional specialization. Our results indicate that domestic service trade has significantly contributed to the regional specialization. On the other hand, we find that, international service trade is more responsible for the increase of the tradable service share than domestic service trade in the aggregate Canadian economy.

According to the standard neoclassical model of trade theory, technology and factor endowments are both important determinants of specialization. This paper attempts to investigate the industrial specialization in China determined by both of the sources of comparative advantage. Using a 30 provinces, 9 years panel of China’s manufacturing industrial data and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) technique, we find that the effect of relative technology differences is quite large and significant during the recent years. Factor endowments differences also have effects on the output share, but the results are inexplicit and elusive in some industries.