Abstract: If urban public services are distributed discriminatively according to whether a resident has his/her own house, the distribution of people with different skills in cities will be affected. Based on a general equilibrium theoretical framework of the interaction between population mobility and housing prices, and making use of the data of the fifth and sixth population census, this paper conducts a study on this point. The findings show that there exists a phenomenon of spatial stratification of human capital in China, and that big cities are more likely to attract higher and lower skilled people than small cities. When public services are geared to all the local residents, the increase of public services will attract both high skilled and low skilled people; when public services are exclusively for home buyers, the increase of the services will attract high skilled people but exclude low skilled people, which explains the reason why big cities attract less low skilled population in China to a certain extent. It is also found that those high skilled are more sensitive to housing prices than those low skilled, and that there exists a skill complementarity between the high skilled and the low skilled. Therefore, to promote the implementation of the policy of“people who rent or buy a house have the same right”and the reform of the household registration system, to encourage the development of housing rental industry and to guarantee the housing supply from multiple channels will help to optimize the structure of urban human capital.

Key words: spatial stratification, heterogeneous public service, housing price, complementary of skills