Labor Migration in China

With the transition of the economy in China, migrants start holding a more and more important position in the labor market. Therefore, from this dissertation, we try to explore different topics related to the migrants in China. This dissertation consists of three essays on who chooses to migrate, how networks affect migrants' outcomes, and what is the intergenerational impact of parental migration on children's risk preferences. In the first chapter, we briefly introduce the motivation and contribution, and then we provide the methods and detailed findings in the following chapters.

Chapter 2 examines the impact of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate on the wage differentials between migrants and non-migrants in China. We find that migrants are self-selected from the upper tail of the income distribution in their home location. Consistent with a theoretical model of migration choice, we show that the size of the selection effect on wage depends on the wage differences between the prefectures of origin and destination as well as migration cost. The selection effect also differs among workers with different education and in different cities.

Chapter 3 studies how networks affect migrants' migration decisions, employment, and wage levels by using 2005 China's mini-census. Different from existing studies, this paper takes into account the existence of self-selection in the labor market. With the help of a theoretical model, we have a better understanding of the mechanism of networks as well as the different network effects on rural and urban migrants. We find out that networks affect both rural and urban migrants' migration decisions positively. In terms of employment, networks exert positive impacts on rural migrants but not on urban ones, which is due to the different quality drops between rural and urban migrants when the networks increase. Such employment effects also lead rural migrants to face a more severe negative wage impact than urban migrants.

Chapter 4 investigates how parental migration affects left-behind underage children's risk preferences. By focusing on migrant parent groups, we are able to estimate whether the influence of nurture could also affect children's risk preference levels or not. The findings suggest that besides the intergenerational transmission of risk preferences between parents and children, parental migrations do have an influence on girls' risk preference levels. In addition, in terms of adult children's risk-related outcomes, we are able to find a positive parental migration impact on daughters' self-employment decisions. Findings help us have a better understanding of the relevant factors of risk preferences, and also confront the impact of the separation of parents and children.