Determinants of Workplace Choice: How Important Is the City’s Ecological Environment in Attracting Jobseekers in China

People’s demands for a better environment have become increasingly strong, and the construction of ecological civilization has risen to the national level of strategic decision making. This paper studies the relationship between city ecological environment and labor mobility decision-making from the micro-individual perspective by matching the latest online resumes micro-big data with the ecological environment index data of 279 cities in China. By estimating a conditional logit model, we find that job seekers are more willing to move to the city with better ecological environment during the job transaction process. The heterogeneity results suggest that the higher the education level and the older the age is, the more sensitive the female are to the city’ ecological environment when switching the workplace. Combined with empirical conclusions, this paper argues that the government in China can open a new way in the competition of labor resources through urban ecological civilization construction and reserve high-quality “fuel” for accelerating economic transformation and achieving high-quality development.