This paper relies on recent proprietary data from China's poor rural minority areas to examine the importance of credit constraints on rural-urban labor migration. Specifically, a liquidity shock via China's minimum living security allowance (MLSA) program is decomposed into its direct and...

Nearly a quarter of all children under the age of two in China are left behind in the countryside as parents migrate to urban areas for work. We use a longitudinal survey following young children and their caregivers from 6 to 30 months of age to estimate the effects of maternal migration on...

The barriers faced by Chinese rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of them choose to leave their children behind. We identified the causal impacts of school fees by instrumenting for it with unexpected shocks...