Land tenure arrangements and rural-to-urban migration: evidence from implementation of China’s rural land contracting law

Abstract This paper studies how land tenure arrangements will shape China’s rural land transfer market and labor allocation. Based on data from the Chinese Household Income Project (2002) and the China Family Panel Studies (2010 and 2012), we use fixed effect models and difference-in-differences method to investigate the effects of the implementation of Rural Land Contracting Law on villagers’ behavioral patterns in land transfer and rural-to-urban migration. Our empirical evidence shows that the introduction of Rural Land Contracting Law led peasants to actively rent out their contracted land, significantly increasing their agricultural income, and thus reducing the rural-to-urban migration. These findings demonstrate the ‘push and pull’ migration theory in the Chinese context, and have important policy implications for the ongoing reform of Chinese rural land property rights.