Like most other developing countries, China experiences huge migration outflows from rural areas. Their most striking characteristic is a high geographical and temporal mobility. Rural migrants keep going back and forth between origin villages and destination areas. In this paper, we show that...

In China, where collectives own farmland but farmers may hold "use rights" to the land, a case can be made for a property rights system with incomplete security of tenure but with strong transfer rights, which permit "specialization without regret"-- so farmers can recoup the value of an...