Author : Zibin Huang
Release : 2021
Genre : Children of migrant laborers
Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis Essays on Migration in China by : Zibin Huang

Download or read book Essays on Migration in China written by Zibin Huang. This book was released on 2021. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation consists of three essays discussing the migration issue in China. Each chapter employs empirical and quantitative applied microeconomics methods. The first chapter studies the impact of the public school enrollment restriction on migrant children in China. Migrant children are disadvantaged and sometimes cannot enroll in public schools in migration destinations due to some policy restrictions. Some migrant workers have to leave their children behind in their hometowns, which causes the left-behind children problem. In this study, I first identify the peer effects of migrant children and left-behind children on their classmates using classroom random assignment. I then analyze the human capital consequences of the enrollment restriction on migrant students within a spatial equilibrium model. My results show that there are negative spillovers from migrant and left-behind students. The negative effect is generally larger from left-behind students, but both shrink over time. In the counterfactual analysis, I find that if the enrollment restriction on migrant children is relaxed, migration of parents and children will increase, and the average human capital in the society will also increase. Low-skill families from small cities benefit most. This policy increases human capital mainly through two channels. First, it directly increases enrollment in good public schools and alleviates the left-behind children problem. Second, it attracts more parents to take their left-behind children to migrate with them and indirectly reduces the total spillovers. This is the first formal quantitative analysis of public school enrollment policy in China. The second chapter studies the role of migration and housing constraints in determining income inequality within and across Chinese cities. Combining microdata and a spatial equilibrium model, we quantify the impact of the massive spatial reallocation of workers and the rapid growth of housing costs on the national income distribution. We first show several stylized facts detailing the strong positive correlation between migration inflows, housing costs, and imputed income inequality among Chinese cities. We then build a spatial equilibrium model featuring workers with heterogeneous skills, housing constraints, and heterogeneous returns from housing ownership to explain these facts. Our quantitative results indicate that the reductions in migration costs and the disproportionate growth in productivity across cities and skills result in the observed massive migration flows. Combining with the tight land supply policy in big cities, the expansion of the housing demand causes the rapid growth of housing costs, and enlarges the inequality between local housing owners and migrants. The counterfactual analysis shows that if we redistribute land supply increment by migrant flow and increase land supply toward cities with more migrants, we could lower the within-city income inequality by 14% and the national income inequality by 18%. Meanwhile, we can simultaneously encourage more migration into higher productivity cities. The third chapter studies the effects of both the number and the gender of children on rural-to-urban parental migration in China. We propose a new semiparametric method to solve an identification difficulty in previous studies and estimate the two effects separately at the same time. We find that having more children promotes rural-to-urban parental migration. Moreover, parents respond more significantly to the presence of boys than to the presence of girls. Without considering the effect of child gender, the instrumental variable estimate for the effect of children number will be strongly downward biased and result in a misleading policy implication"--Pages ix-xi.