The Impact of Land Property Right on China’s Rural-urban Migration

Abstract

China is undergoing a rural land system reform called Three Rights Division (TRD) which promotes the transformation of land management right and guarantees the security of land contract right. In this paper, we study the impacts of rural land system on migration under market (the ability to rent land) and government (land expropriation) mechanism. We employ the Probit model with robustness and endogenous checks to identify whether rent behavior and land insecurity have impacts on migration. Results show that the rent behavior has a positive impact on migration while land insecurity is negative, indicating that the reform of TRD promotes the probability to migrate both through market and government mechanism.