The Income Effect of Job Turnover and its Policy Implications among Migrant Workers in Urban China

Scholars have not reached an agreement about the impact of job turnover on wage change, especially about the patterns of job change and the impact of the previous job on wages.The existing studies have taken more account of individual factors such as human capital or social capital, rather than the special labor market structure of a floating population.In this paper, the Heckman model is used to analyze the impact of the characteristics of the previous job and the way of job turnover influences wage change and explore how human capital and social capital work for the mobility of migrant workers in a segmented labor market.Our results show that the higher the previous wage rate, the lower the marginal wage growth when changing jobs, while the impact of social capital on wage growth is insignificant.Wage growth has a significant effect on jobs requiring a college and above education, but its effect is insignificant for jobs without such requirements.These phenomena originate from the "Ceiling Effect" in the wages of the migrant workers in the secondary labor market.Migrant workers have been bound in the labor force structure due to the strong homogeneity of their social relationships.Only the workers who have enough human capital can successfully overcome this barrier.