【题  目】Time cost of shopping and labor supply: evidence from e-commerce expansion in rural China

【时  间】2020年12月2日（星期三），14:30-16:00

【地  点】北京师范大学后主楼1610

【主讲人】王悦 博士候选人 （康奈尔大学经济系）

摘要：

Since 2014, the Chinese government has been supporting major e-commerce development in rural areas. One likely consequence of the expansion of e-commerce is saving in time cost of shopping for people in remote villages. This paper analyzes the impact of this time saving on labor supply of men and women in rural China. I first uncover the heterogeneity of response in e-commerce use to the government program with a machine learning approach. Then to investigate the causal effect of e-commerce expansion, I exploit an interaction IV strategy making use of the roll-out time of the government program and heterogenous response of online shopping to the program across distance and age structure, as supported by findings from the machine learning approach. My estimates suggest that e-commerce expansion increases weekly labor supply by 7 hours, and the probability of working in the wage sector by 14 percentage points. The result is significant for both men and women, but in a gender differentiated manner. It shifts labor away from self-employed agriculture to the wage sector for the men, and from working inside the home to outside the home for women. It also facilitates worker movement from rural to urban jobs.

主讲人简介：

王悦，康奈尔大学经济系博士候选人。曾担任世界银行短期顾问。王悦从事发展经济学，劳动经济学，公共经济学领域的研究。学术论文被Journal of Comparative Economics接受发表。