Abstract: Talent distribution within China exhibit significant regional disparities. Local governments have implemented favorable policies to win the increasingly heated competition for talents. These pose new challenges for exploring the law of talent flows and promoting balanced regional economic development. This study focuses on college graduates in China and builds a dynamic multi-region model of migration to quantitatively analyze the impact of different individual characteristics (such as academic degree, school rank, and major) and economic factors (including real wage, migration cost, and amenity) on their job location decisions. Using data from a leading professional social network, we find that migration frictions fall with higher academic degrees and school rankings. Graduates with science degrees encounter lower migration frictions than those with engineering or arts and social science degrees. Estimated inflow barriers to talents rise from northwest to southeast gradually. Counterfactual analyses imply that a permanent increase in wages in any province improves welfare for graduates in all provinces. Western provinces need to offer higher wages than coastal provinces to attract an equivalent talent flow.
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