Seminar Vol. 109

Title: Money or Marriage? The Migration of China’s Rural Women

Speaker: Chunbing Xing, Beijing Normal University 

Time: November 5th, 2018 15:00–16:15

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building

About the speaker:

Chunbing Xing is a Professor at School of Economics and Business Administration, Beijing Normal University. He received PhD in Economics from Guanghua School of Management, Peking University in 2006. Chunbing Xing was a visiting scholar at OECD Development Centre during the summer of 2008. He was also a visiting scholar and a Post Doc in the Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario between January 2010 and December 2011. In March 2010, Chunbing Xing joined IZA as a Research Fellow. His main research areas of interest include rural-urban migration, income distribution, human capital and wage determination in China. 

Abstract:

While working age men, on average, are more susceptible to migration than women in rural China, the opposite is true of the rural youths. We propose a model of joint decision of migration and human capital investment, where both women and men from rural areas maximize life-time earnings and women’s productive migration duration is shorter. The model predicts that women tend to invest less in schooling or job search and migrate earlier to exploit the rural-urban wage differential, leading to a surplus of women in young migrants. Consistent with the model, we show that women are more likely to drop out of school when facing migration opportunities and that women’s labor supply is much higher when they are young. Marriage motive is unable to explain young women’s migration because (1) women’s migration is temporary and its duration is shorter than men and (2) the migration of young women has limited (if not negligible) impacts on the marriage markets of both origin and host regions. No consistent evidence suggests that the demand for young women is larger than that for the old.