As a pilot initiative of an important industrial policy, the Pilot Free Trade Zone (PFTZ) provides a valuable opportunity to examine its impact on the labor market. This paper evaluates the employment effects of PFTZs using a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach, based on data from 257 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2019. The results show that the establishment of PFTZs has significantly promoted employment growth, with varying effects across different batches of PFTZs. Among them, the Shanghai PFTZ remains the core of this policy experiment. Additionally, the implementation of PFTZs has led to significant shifts in employment structure, characterized by a decline in secondary sector employment and an increase in tertiary sector employment. Further analysis reveals that employment growth is particularly notable in sub-sectors such as information and computer services, public administration, and environmental utilities. Overall, our findings demonstrate the positive role of government-led industrial policies in promoting economic development and provide valuable insights for future policy design. Policy evaluation, labor, employment, staggered Difference-in-Differences, heterogeneity analysis

This paper explores the effect of the digital economy on human migration in Guangdong Province. This paper measures the effect of digital economy development on human migration in 21 prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province, China, from 2011 to 2019 using a fixed-effects model. The results of this study show that there is a significant positive effect of digital economy on net migration rate, and there is a significant negative effect on emigration rates. There is also a significant pull effect of economic development level and health-care level on migration. This finding holds after introducing instrumental variables estimation. This study provides explanatory mechanisms and empirical evidence for the development of digital economy and human migration, which helps to understand the mechanism of action between the development of digital economy and human migration. On this basis, this study puts forward policy recommendations, which provide some reference basis for the formulation of policies on digital economy and talent introduction in Guangdong Province.