Expropriation with hukou change and labour market outcomes in China

We study the labour market outcomes of Chinese household members changing their registration status (hukou) from rural to urban as a result of land expropriation using panel data from the 2008–2010 Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC). While it is largely unclear the extent to which expropriation can be viewed as an event exogenous to individual and household choices, we deal with the potential selection bias of being expropriated by using the methodology proposed by Oster (2019). Gaining an urban hukou is found to improve the labour market outcomes of expropriated household heads and spouses relative to comparable rural stayers and rural-urban migrants. In particular, hukou-changers gain better access to permanent jobs in the public sector through formal search channels. We also find that expropriated parents invest substantially more in children's human capital as compared to rural parents, suggesting that leveling the hukou status among children can contribute to reducing intergenerational inequality.     

户籍门槛、发展型政府与人口城镇化政策——基于大中城市面板数据的经验研究

文章从制度变迁视角分析了户籍改革难以突破的原因,在发展主义理念的指引下,如果户籍改革对地方经济增长或财政收支产生负面影响,地方政府可能会拖延或阻碍改革进程。基于大中城市面板数据的实证研究显示,特大城市提高门槛对地方人均产出有正面影响,户籍改革动力最弱。其他城市虽然可以通过降低户籍门槛提高人均产出水平,但率先放开户籍制度可能引发流动人口大量涌入抵消政策效果,地方政府的户籍改革动力随着城市人口规模增长逐步下降。同时,户籍人口增长会带来财政支出的显著增加,为避免户籍化政策对财政支出产生压力,地方政府会通过户籍门槛对流动人口进行筛选,将对财政收入贡献较低或产生明显财政支出的群体排斥在户籍门槛之外。本文认为中国大中城市的户籍制度存在刚性,可以通过收回地方制定落户政策的权力强制推动户籍制度改革,或利用财政政策降低户籍化成本,激励地方政府推动改革。     

Consumption Structure of Migrant Worker Families in China

This study draws on a survey of migrants in 12 cities across four major urbanizing areas in China and investigates the structure of migrant worker families' urban and rural consumption. The results show that the structure of migrant worker families' consumption has been dominated by survival consumption. These families tend to live frugally in cities while engaging in conspicuous consumption in their rural hometowns. The structure of migrant worker families' consumption is mainly shaped by their income stability and wealth levels rather than their current income level. Moreover, migrant worker families with high educational levels and those who intend to settle permanently in cities are likely to allocate substantial expenditure to status and hedonic consumption and to upgrade their urban consumption structure.     

China's urban poor – Comparing twice poverty between residents and migrants in 2013 and 2018

Using data from the China Household Income Project in 2013 and 2018, this paper studies relative poverty among rural hukou holders living in urban China and urban hukou holders. People living in households with an income below a fixed percent of the median per-capita income and wealth below the same fixed percent of the median per-capita wealth among urban residents are deemed as relative poor. Although migrants with rural hukou living in urban China were more prone to twice poverty than urban residents in 2013, this was not generally the case in 2018.A multivariate analysis shows several factors to be related to the probability of being twice relative poor. Even considering these factors, a rural hukou status increased the probability of being twice relative poor in 2013. In contrast, such an excess risk of being twice relative poor was much lesser outspoken in middle and low-ranking cities in 2018. However, rural to urban migrants living in high-ranking cities had a somewhat higher risk of being relative poor than urban residents with the same characteristics in 2018.     

Permanent migration desire of Chinese rural residents: Evidence from field surveys, 2006–2015

This paper provides new evidence on the actual and intended migration patterns of permanent rural-urban migration in China based on local field surveys conducted from 2006–2015. The actual permanent migration pattern shows a home province dominance. The pattern of permanent migration intentions indicates a simultaneous consideration for both city location and city scale. Interest in large cities is limited to large cities within the home province. Using survey questions that present hypothetical policy scenarios, rural residents' responses to the relaxation of urban hukou restrictions and the rural land rights institution are examined. The responses reveal a reluctance to engage in inter-provincial permanent migration if hukou restrictions are eliminated in all Chinese cities. A survey-based choice experiment reveals that removing the condition of rural land rights on rural hukou status can induce within-province permanent migration, but it is not impactful in facilitating permanent, inter-provincial migration. If the playing field of hukou entry is leveled for all skill levels and rural land rights are guaranteed unconditionally, then at low values of years of schooling, an additional year has a negative effect on the intention to engage in permanent, inter-provincial migration.     

Land Ownership as an Urban Employment Disincentive for Rural Migrants in China

When landowning rural migrants in urban areas in China become unemployed, they retain the option to return home to agricultural work. As a result, the opportunity cost of the loss of employment for these migrants declines. In addition, the potential wealth arising from compensation for expropriated rural land increases significantly with ongoing urbanization in China. This weakens the incentive for landowning rural migrants to work as hard in urban employment as they might otherwise. In this paper, we employ the Floating Population Dynamic Monitoring Survey for Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou in 2012, as surveyed by the Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission to assess the employment disincentives induced by rural land ownership. We find that compared with landless rural migrants, landowning rural migrants generally have less job stability and lower salaries.     

Housing wealth changes and entrepreneurship: Evidence from urban China

This paper studies the impact of household-level housing wealth changes on entrepreneurship in urban China. Exploiting the 2011–2015 China Household Finance Survey, we control for lagged proxies for wealth, city-by-year fixed effects, and other household attributes and directly estimate the magnitude of homeowner's response to housing capital gains net of home maintenance and upgrading expenditures. We also instrument for housing wealth changes with structural breaks in city housing price trend. We find that a 10,000 RMB increase in housing wealth increases the propensity of a household becoming a business owner by about 0.7 percentage points in IV estimation. In addition, we provide new evidence for underlying channels that housing capital gains alleviate household credit constraints, reduce risk aversion and increase awareness of financial information.     

Housing Wealth, Financial Wealth and Consumption in China

The paper investigates the relationship between changes in asset wealth and the trend movements of household consumption in urban China. Using the vector error correction cointegration model we demonstrate that there is a unique long-run cointegrating relationship between household consumption, disposable income, financial wealth and housing wealth in urban China. We find that housing wealth is the only factor that restores the long-run equilibrium relationship when the cointegrated system is disturbed by an external shock. In addition, our permanent-transitory variance decomposition analysis indicates that nearly all variance in the movement of consumption is permanent, supporting the classical random walk hypothesis of consumption behavior. However, a large proportion of variance in the short-run movements of housing wealth is found to be transitory.     

Return Migrants: The Rise of New Entrepreneurs in Rural China

This paper analyzes return migrants’ self-employment decision upon their return to their home villages, by using an original rural household survey conducted in Wuwei County (Anhui province, China) in 2008. We find that return migrants are more likely to be self-employed than nonmigrants, and that both return savings and the frequency of job changes during migration increase the likelihood for return migrants to become self-employed. These findings suggest that (a) return migration can help revitalize rural economies and alleviate poverty in less developed areas in China, and (b) repatriated capital is a key, stimulating factor in promoting rural entrepreneurial activities.     

身份认同对流动人口家庭在流入地消费的影响

流动人口在城市的社会融合是健康城市化的重要内容，并且其本身也产生众多经济影响。文章利用2014年国家卫计委"流动人口社会融合与心理健康专题调查"的调查数据，分析流动人口不同的本地城市人身份认同对其家庭消费水平、家庭消费结构的影响。由于身份认同受到很多因素影响，具有内生性，因此我们在OLS基准回归之外，采用流动人口"本地话掌握水平"及"流出地土地面积"作为工具变量处理可能的内生性问题。我们也进行了替代变量的稳健性检验以及各种异质性检验。我们发现流动人口不同的身份认同程度对家庭消费水平、家庭消费结构有显著影响：更认同本地城市人身份的流动群体消费更高、恩格尔系数更低。同时，身份认同的消费影响在不同群体间存在一定异质性：这种效应对于年长的流动人口以及农村户籍流动人口更显著，这些异质性发现也符合预期。文章也进行了影响的可能机制检验，发现认可本地人身份的流动人口更倾向于在本地买房、长期工作生活和落户，减少在老家购房和生活的可能。研究结果对认识身份认同经济影响有一定学术价值；同时，文章的政策含义是，促进流动人口本地身份认同可以促进城市消费活力和居民生活质量。     

Firm agglomeration and local poverty reduction: evidence from an economy in transition

We examine the linkages between firm agglomeration and the welfare of households in Vietnam. We measured firm agglomeration by per capita firm output at the district level and household welfare by per capita income, expenditure, and poverty. We find that firm agglomeration helps households move from the informal sector to the formal sector. As a result, there is a positive effect of firm agglomeration on per capita income, per capita expenditure, and poverty reduction, albeit of a small and time‐decreasing magnitude. The effect of firm agglomeration on per capita expenditure tends to be higher for households with men, younger, and more educated heads than households with women, older, and less educated heads. Households in rural areas and those that do not have crop land are more likely to benefit from firm agglomeration than those living in urban areas and having crop land.     

Moving to the right place at the right time: Economic effects on migrants of the Manchuria Plague of 1910–11

How do initial arrival conditions in a host locality affect migrants’ subsequent economic welfare? Manchuria (Northeast China), which attracted millions of migrants from North China during the first half of the twentieth century, experienced a devastating pneumonic plague outbreak in 1910–11. Using data from a rural household survey in the mid-1930s, we explore how the post-plague conditions in various villages affected migrant cohorts’ long-term wealth accumulation. We find that the migrant households that moved to plague-hit villages soon after the plague ended prospered the most: they owned at least 112% more land than migrant households that either moved elsewhere or migrated to the same village before or long after the plague outbreak. Our results are robust after controlling for factors that influence the long-term wealth accumulation of migrants and are not caused by selection.     

University education,homeownership and housing wealth

We utilise the implementation of the 1999 higher education expansion in China as a natural experiment to examine the relationship between university educational attainment, homeownership and housing wealth. Using data from the 2018 China Family Panel Studies, results from our preferred models, which correct for endogeneity, suggest that having a university qualification generates a 3.5–6.3 percentage points increase in the probability of homeownership and a 24.3–51.1 percentage points increase in total housing wealth. We also find that holding a university qualification increases the number of houses one owns and housing wealth for those whose housing wealth is above the median. We find that self-reported social status and entitlement to superannuation are channels through which higher education affects homeownership and housing wealth and that financial literacy is a channel through which higher education affects housing wealth. We find considerable heterogeneity in the impact of higher education on housing outcomes across gender, family income levels, parent education and between urban and rural areas.     

Employment constraints and sub-optimality in Chinese enterprises

In China the employment of rural migrants is tightly controlledby government, with regard both to numbers and to jobs: urbanresidents receive preference and are protected against competitionfrom migrants. A survey of enterprises employing both urbanresidents and rural migrants in four cities is analysed, usingenterprise-level earnings comparisons, employment functionsand production functions. We find both 'job discrimination'and 'wage discrimination' against migrants. The two groups arehighly imperfect substitutes or, in a sense, complementary:migrants do the jobs that non-migrants will nor or cannot do.The marginal product of migrants exceeds their wage whereasthat of non-migrants is below their wage. Although many enterpriseshave surplus urban workers, they find it beneficial to hiremigrant workers as well and are constrained in their employmentof migrants.     

Do migrants get stuck in the informal sector? Findings from a household survey in four Indonesian cities

This article compares labour-market outcomes for individuals in migrant and non-migrant households in Indonesia. It introduces two new work-status groups – small-business operators and formal-casual or contract employees – in an effort to transcend the usual formal–informal distinction. We find that long-term migrants (LTMs) tend to gravitate to the small-business sector and to jobs with regular wages, whereas recent and very recent migrants are more likely to work in the informal sector. Our findings on the labour-market outcomes of successive generations of migrants are less conclusive. While a larger proportion of LTM children than that of their parents work in the formal sector, the children of migrant heads of households are less likely than those of non-migrants to find formal-sector jobs. We also find that distortionary labour-market regulations appear to diminish the overall benefits of migration.     

Housing price and household savings rates: evidence from China

This article investigates the effect of house prices on household savings rates in urban China employing the 2002 and 2007 data of the Chinese Households Income Project (CHIP). We find that the rapid appreciation of house prices cannot explain high Chinese households’ savings rates and the rising of Chinese savings rates. On the contrary, we find a negative relationship between house prices and household savings rates for home renters and homeowners. We do not find any evidence of ‘savings for housing purchase’ for young home renters when house prices increase. Their savings rates declined during housing market booms in recent 10?years. Savings rates of homeowners possessing multiple housing have decreased more because of ‘the pure housing wealth effects.’     

Self-selection and Earnings of Migrants: Evidence from Rural China

Using data from a rural household survey in China, this paper explores the link between employment choice (nonworking, local farm work, local nonfarm work and migratory work) and migrant earnings. We find significant self-selection in migration. Youths, men, better-educated individuals and those in good health are more likely to migrate. In terms of unobserved characteristics, we find positive selection in migration to be related to the alternatives of not working and local farm work, and negative selection to be related to local nonfarm work. Controlling for self-selection, the wage returns to gender (male), education and health are lower than those obtained from OLS, and the returns to experience are higher. More importantly, we find different self-selection between individuals who have moved as pioneers and migrants from households in which other members have already migrated.     

玻璃幕墙下的劳动力流动——制度约束、社会互动与滞后的城市化

中国的农村劳动力在城乡和地区间的流动是在全球市场一体化和国内市场分割的背景下出现的。规模日益庞大的流动劳动力以流向东南沿海城市的制造业和服务业为主,但由于户籍、土地等制度的制约,劳动力流动短期特征明显,但趋势又是长期化,因此,形成了城市内部的“新二元结构”。早期的实证研究注重从个人特征、家庭特征和政策环境的角度来研究劳动力流动,较新的研究从人力资本外部性和规模经济的角度研究劳动力流动的方向,为劳动力流动的动因提供了新的见解。但是,如果要解释中国劳动力流动中的一些特殊现象,就需要在制度约束和信息不充分的条件下研究社会互动对于劳动力流动的影响。基于这些研究,有效推进劳动力流动和城市化进程的政策应该包括以提高教育为主的经济政策、以促进信息交流为主的社会政策,以及推进城乡融合为主的制度变革。     

Can self-employment activity contribute to ascension to urban citizenship? Evidence from rural-to-urban migrant workers in China

The ascension to urban citizenship and assimilation into urban life for rural to urban migrant workers is a pressing mission during the current process of rapid urbanization in developing China. However, the issue of how self-employed migrants, who account for up to 25 percent of total migrant workers in 2009 (Meng, 2012), acquire urban citizenship remains understudied. Using a unique sample from the 2009 Rural to Urban Migrants in China (RUMiC) survey, this paper explores whether self-employment choice contributes to migrant workers' ascension to urban citizenship and integration, and uncovers the underlying mechanisms. We find that although self-employed migrants are capable of earning a higher income, and improving their living conditions, their tendency to reside permanently in the city is not significantly different from their counterparts of wage workers. We argue that self-employed migrants, who are less covered by urban social securities and are more discriminated against by current urban household registration (Hukou) system, tend to lose faith in ascension to urban citizenship. It implies that a social security system with self-employed migrants being covered as well as an urban Hukou admission system favoring diverse human capital (especially taking into account entrepreneurship) would help accelerate the urbanization process.     

Losing the future: Household wealth from urban housing demolition and children's human capital in China

Some literature observes the negative but not very significant effect of household wealth growth on children's educational outcomes. This surprising finding is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanation that relaxed economic constraints caused by wealth growth can promote human capital accumulation. This paper proposes an alternative explanation for the causal relationship between wealth growth and human capital, which could be negative: individuals tend to reduce human capital investment following the decline in their labor supply induced by wealth growth, given that investing in human capital is mainly for employment competitiveness. This explanation is supported by evidence from the case of urban housing demolition in China, in which affected households could obtain substantial wealth growth by considerable demolition compensation thanks to the real estate boom in China. Specifically, using two nationally representative datasets, we find that Chinese households that have experienced demolition relatively have more wealth, less labor supply, lower propensity to accumulate children's human capital, and consequently, have children with lower educational achievement. These results suggest that China's economy may be losing its momentum because of the decline in labor supply and human capital accumulation brought about by the ongoing large-scale urban housing demolition.