Rural-urban migrants in China appear to prefer nearby destination cities. To gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, we build a simple model in which migrants from rural areas choose among potential destination cities to maximize utility. The distance between a migrant's home village and destination city is explicitly included in the utility function. Using recent survey data, we first estimate an individual's expected income in each potential destination city using a semi-parametric method, controlling for potential self-selection biases. We then estimate the indirect utility function for rural- urban migrants in China based on their migration destination choices.
Our baseline estimates suggest that to induce a migrant to move 10 percent further away from home, the income of this migrant has to increase by 15 percent. This elasticity varies very little with migration distance; it is slightly higher for female than male migrants; it is not affected by the migrant's age, education, or marital status. We explore possible explanations of these results and discuss their policy implications.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.