Migration premium? The economic returns to youth inter-province migration in post-reform China

Abstract

Every year, millions of young people migrate away from their home provinces for higher education and employment in China. However, less is known about the extent to which Chinese young people may benefit economically from their migration. Analyzing nationally representative data from the new China College Student Survey, this paper examines the impact of inter-province migration on the starting salaries of Chinese young people after undergraduate studies. Utilizing the method of propensity score matching, this research reveals differences in the economic returns to migration for higher education and for work, and between young people of rural and urban hukou origins. The economic premium attached to inter-province education migration is largely mediated and thus explained by socioeconomic disparities across Chinese provinces. By contrast, young people's work migration generates a positive economic premium, over and above the wage disparity between sending and host provinces. Underlining the context-dependent nature of the migration premium, the results draw attention to China's institutional features-i.e. the structural configurations of education and work migration and the hukou system-in shaping the economic returns to youth migration. Rural and urban young people's differential access to the migration premium may also exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities in post-reform China.

Moving to ‘Bei–Shang–Guang’? Internal migration, local hukou barriers and labour market outcomes among college graduates in China

“…The credibility of self‐reported earnings has been described in previous studies (H. Li et al, 2012). Finally, due to the skewed distribution of wage information, a logarithmic transformation of this variable was performed during the analysis (Zhao & Hu, 2019).…”

Does Natural Amenity Matter on the Permanent Settlement Intention? Evidence from Elderly Migrants in Urban China

“…The low-value areas of the settlement intention of the elderly were mainly distributed in some cities along the southeast coast, such as Ningbo, Taizhou, and Wenzhou, and some scattered cities in the central and western regions, indicating that these cities were not popular with the elderly. It can be seen from Figure 1 that although the economic development level, medical level, and infrastructure conditions in eastern China were found to be relatively good for the elderly, they did not pay much attention to those aspects, but preferred to choose to live in some places with better natural amenity, which is different from the choices of young people [40]. In addition, for most cities, the average ratio of women's willingness to settle was higher than that of men, indicating that women were more likely to move to non-native places after retirement.…”

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Role of job mobility frequency in job satisfaction changes: the mediation mechanism of job-related social capital and person‒job match

“…First, job mobility is a popular variable in vocational behaviour research, with varying measurements. While some studies consider the voluntary and involuntary types of job mobility's influence on life and job satisfaction (Chadi and Hetschko, 2021;Garthe and Hasselhorn, 2021), others also use the change times of job mobility to describe different motivations of job mobility across career stages, or the range of effect of job mobility on economic dividend (Duarte and Lopes, 2018;Zhao and Hu, 2019). To sum up, changing times is a common method for describing the job mobility variable.…”