Peer Migration in China

Abstract

AbstractWith over 290 million rural labourers transitioning to urban areas in 2019, China is experiencing an unparalleled scale of internal migration, the largest in human history. Employing instrumental variables (IVs) gleaned from the 2006 China Agricultural Census (CAC), we find that a 10 percentage point increase in the migration rate among co‐villagers amplifies an individual's probability of migrating by 7.13 percentage points. Influencing factors such as information dissemination at the origin and cost efficiencies at the destination likely contribute to the observed clustering of migration by age, destination and industrial sector. Intriguingly, migration seems to exert a negligible influence on the agricultural productivity of those who remain, which may be due to substantial labour redundancy at the point of origin and potentially higher productivity among migrants.