Persistent productivity gains to rural-urban migrants have been documented by a number of researchers. One interpretation of this result is that individuals learn higher value skills in cities than they would have learned in less dense areas. Another explanation for this result, however, is that...

Job-related welfare entitlements are common in China. Migrants who do not hold urban registration are, in principle, not entitled to job-related welfare even if they are employees in the State sector. The official explanation is that rural-urban migrants are allocated access to farm land in...

The process of economic development is characterized by substantial rural-urban migrations and a decreasing share of agriculture in output and employment. The literature highlights two main engines behind this process of structural change: (i) improvements in agricultural technology combined...

China has been experiencing two major demographic sea changes since the late 1970s: (i) Internal migration, primarily rural-to-urban, on a scale that dwarfs all other countries at any time in history; and (ii) a shift in its age distribution. The basic question posed in this paper is: How are...

The paper studies the dynamic change of the migrant labor market in China from 2002 to 2007 using two comparable data sets. Our focus is on the rural-urban migration decision, the wage structure of migrants, the urban labor market segmentation between migrants and urban natives, and the changes...

We hypothesize that individuals with a larger social-family network are more likely to choose self-employment. We test this hypothesis using data on temporary rural-urban migrants in China. The size of a migrant's social-family network is measured by the number of relatives and friends this...

As their environment changes, migrants constitute an interesting group to study the effect of relative income on subjective well-being. This paper focuses on the huge population of rural-to-urban migrants in China. Using a novel dataset, we find that the well-being of migrants depends on several...

Do people move to cities because of marriage market considerations? In cities singles can meet more potential partners than in rural areas. Singles are therefore prepared to pay a premium in terms of higher housing prices. Once married, the marriage market benefits disappear while the housing...

We focus on the impact of migrants' remittances on consumption patterns in rural China, allowing for endogeneity of remittances and county fixed-effects. We find that the marginal propensity to consume out of remittances is close to unity, which is far greater than that out of non-migrant...

This paper studies the impact of remittances on the savings behaviour of rural households in China, using a cross-sectional survey. Allowing for endogeneity and left-censoring of remittances, we find that the marginal propensity to save out of remittances is well below half of that out of other...