Catalysts or Barriers? The Impacts of Natural Disasters on Internal Labor Migration in China

This paper discusses ways in which negative economic shocks captured by natural disasters can shape internal labor migration in China. The impact of negative economic shocks on migration depends on the combination of two opposite driving forces: (i) negative economic shocks can make staying in the affected area less profitable, thus enhancing returns to migration; (ii) the shocks can make it more difficult to migrate out, thus inducing a higher fixed cost of migration. Based on a nationwide dataset of China, this paper shows that when natural disasters were not severe, they caused migration out of rural areas. With sufficiently severe damage, however, the negative effect of natural disasters could be mitigated by villages' prior migrant networks. Specifically, with a severe shock, only clan members were able to migrate in response to natural disasters and enjoyed the complementary effects of prior migrant networks, as they could receive more help from social capital.