Abstract
This paper studies the impact of urban opening on migrant "income premium" from the perspective of export trade. The native places of official overseas students and cities of open trading ports in the late Qina Dynasty are used as two sets of instrumental variables. The regression results show that urban export growth sianificantly reduces the immigrant income premium, and urban export narrows the income gap between non-local and local workers is mainly narrowed by the screening effect and spillover efect of the export. Further research proves that the effect of export is not changed by the difference in the length of household registration of the local household labor, in other words, the opening of the city can increase the income level of all local household labor, thus reducing the immigrant income premium. It can be summarized that adhering to the opening up is an advantage to achieving income equality between laborers with different household registrations within the city.Therefore,the local labor force should support the opening of the city to the outside world, so that the surplus benefits of exports to local labor income can be fully enioyed.
Keyword:urban export, income premium,screen effect,spillover effect
