Abstract：Based on manufacturing firm data(1998-2007)released by China's National Bureau of Statistics(NBS), this paper examines the impact of sorting effect on big cities' productivity advantage using the method of unconditional distribution characteristics and parameters corresponding, through which we can control the agglomeration effect and selection effect. We first find that, contrary to the predictions of most theoretic studies, a large number of medium-efficient firms are concentrated in big cities, while firms with high-or low-efficiency choose small cities.Second, the estimation of agglomeration effect in big cities will be biased when ignoring sorting effect.Specifically, agglomeration effect will be overvalued by 1.82 times at the 1st quartile of productivity distribution, while the degree of overestimation will increase with the rise of quantile.Third, low-efficient firms benefit more from big cities' agglomeration economy, which means that, just like a nursery, big cities can provide a better entrepreneurship environment for firms.Last but not the least, the conclusions above remain valid after a series of robustness tests.
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2017, Vol. 40 
