HEALTH CONSEQUENCES OF RURAL-TO-URBAN MIGRATION: EVIDENCE FROM PANEL DATA IN CHINA

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the health consequences of rural-to-urban migration in China. We use a panel dataset from 2003 to 2006 constructed by the Research Center on the Rural Economy at the Ministry of Agriculture in China to investigate the effects of short-term and medium-term migration on health status. By combining propensity-score matching and the difference-in-difference model, we attempt to overcome the migration endogeneity issue and estimate the average treatment effect on the treated. We find that the effect of short-term migration on health in China is significantly positive mostly because of the income effect. However, the effect of longer-term continuous migration on health is insignificant and close to zero. Our results are robust to several alternative estimation techniques and a series of robustness checks. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.