城市关注提升能减小城乡收入差距吗?

Can Increased Urban Attention Reduce Urban-rural Income Gap?

随着数字经济时代来临,社会主体主要通过互联网搜索的方式获取外部信息、增大对城市的关注,而对城市关注度的提升直接影响城市发展以及城乡收入分配。文章利用2009—2016年地级市层面的百度搜索点击量衡量社会主体对城市的关注程度,研究城市关注度提升对城乡收入差距的影响。实证发现,社会主体对城市关注程度的提升显著减小了城乡收入差距,排除内生性干扰后得出了同样的结论;机制检验表明,城市关注程度的提升显著降低了城市失业率且促进了城乡人口流动,就业效应是城市关注提升减小城乡收入差距的影响渠道,但城乡人口流动并未通过中介效应检验;同时,技术创新与城市关注存在交互作用,创新效应显著加强了城市关注提升促进城乡收入差距收敛的积极作用;异质性分析发现,城市关注提升主要减小了经济发展水平较低地区和互联网普及率较低地区的城乡收入差距。

With the advent of digital economy era,social entities mainly obtain external information and increase their attention to cities through the Internet searches,and the increased urban attention directly affects urban development and urban-rural income distribution.By using the number of Baidu search hits at the level of prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2016,this study measures the attention degree of social subjects to cities and explores the impact of increased urban attention on urban-rural income gap.It is found through the empirical research that the increase in social subjects’attention to cities has significantly reduced urban-rural income gap,and the same conclusion has been drawn after excluding endogenous interference;the mechanism test shows that increased urban attention has significantly reduced urban unemployment rate and promoted urban and rural population flow,and the employment effect is the impact channel of increased urban attention reducing urban-rural income gap,but urban and rural population flow has not passed the mesomeric effect test;and meanwhile,there exists an interaction between technological innovation and urban attention,and the innovation effect significantly strengthens the positive role of increased urban attention in promoting the convergence of urban-rural income gap;and that it is found through heterogeneity analysis that increased urban attention mainly reduces the urban-rural income gap in the areas with lower economic development levels and lower Internet penetration rates.