Urban–Rural Income Gap in China

This study mainly explores the impact of artificial intelligence on the urban-rural income gap and uncovers the intrinsic link from the perspective of factor misallocation. The key conclusions are as follows:
·AI significantly narrows China’s urban-rural income gap with a nonlinear threshold effect, verified via robust tests.
· Labor/capital misallocation alleviation and industrial upgrading are key channels of AI’s income-converging effect.
· Spatial Durbin model identifies significant positive spatial spillovers of AI on neighboring regions’ income gap.
· Heterogeneous effects exist across regions, city scales, and tiers, with prominent impacts in medium/small cities.