Employment Effects Of Transportation Infrastructure

China has maintained a relatively high economic growth rate ever since the reform and opening-up policy was introduced;meanwhile,the unemployment in China has become increasingly serious due to the imbalance of regional development.This dissertation discusses the transportation cost and its main influence factors during the process of employment firstly,and then studies the effects of transportation infrastructure on labor supply and demand.Further more,this dissertation estimates the causal effects of transportation infrastructure on the labor employment through the following methods:first,taking high-speed railway as a quasi-experimental design,we build a PSM-DID model and examined the employment effects of high-speed railway infrastructure in China;second,we use the 2016 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey(CLDS)national baseline survey data and examined the employment effects of transportation intrastructure in the whole country.By appling instrumental variable regression strategies,this dissertation solves the problem of the endogeneity of transportation.Differences in gender,age,between urban and rural areas,and between eastern and western regions are compared separately in this dissertation.This dissertation attempts to estimate the causal effects of transportation infrastructure on labor supply,migrant,and annual income in China.It is found that the transportation infracturcture is positively and significantly associated with more non-agricultural work,better work structure,more migrant and higher level of annual income,while the associations are stronger and more significantly among women and labor force who are under fourty.There are huge differences between urban and rural areas.In urban area,transportation index is positively correlated with labor supply,migrant and income level,while in rural area,transportation index is negatively associated with non-agriculture work,migrant and income.The differences among regions are also big.As is shown in our results,strong and positive correlations are found between transportation and non-agriculture work,migrant and income in eastern and central China,while no significant effects of transportation are found in western China.Because of the siphon effects and shrinkage effects in less developed areas,the government should not only expand the traffic infrastructure investment as the positive fiscal policy,but also conduct good plan for the regional industrial structure layout so as to provide more and better job opportunities in their local labor market.