Abstract:Talent distribution within China exhibits significant regional disparities. Local governments have implemented favorable policies to gain an edge in the increasingly heated competition for talent. These pose new challenges for exploring the law of talent flows and promoting balanced regional economic development. This study focuses on college graduates in China and builds a dynamic multi-region model of migration to quantitatively analyze the impact of different individual characteristics (such as academic degree, school rank, and major) and economic factors (including real wage, migration cost, and amenity) on their job location decisions. Using data from a leading professional social network, we find that migration frictions fall with higher academic degrees and school rankings. Graduates with science degrees encounter lower migration frictions than those with engineering or arts and social science degrees. Estimated barriers to talent inflows gradually increase from the northwest to the southeast. Counterfactual analyses imply that a permanent wage increase in any province improves the welfare of graduates across all provinces. Western provinces need to offer higher wages than coastal provinces to attract an equivalent talent flow.