Social assimilation and labour market outcomes of migrants in China

Shu Cai and Klaus Zimmermann ()

No 2020-051, MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT)

Abstract: Previous research has found identity to be relevant for international migration, but has neglected internal mobility as in the case of the Great Chinese Migration. However, the context of the identities of migrants and their adaption in the migration process is likely to be quite different. The gap is closed by examining social assimilation and the effect on the labourmarket outcomes of migrants in China, the country with the largest record of internal mobility. Using instrumental variable estimation, the study finds that identifying as local residents significantly increase migrants’ hourly wages and reduce hours worked, although their monthly earnings remained barely changed. Further findings suggest that migrants with strong local identity are more likely to use local networks in job search, and to obtain jobs with higher average wages and lower average hours worked per day.

Keywords: Social assimilation; identity; labour market; migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J31 J61 O15 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-11-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-lma, nep-mig, nep-tra and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://unu-merit.nl/publications/wppdf/2020/wp2020-051.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Assimilation and Labor Market Outcomes of Migrants in China (2020)
Working Paper: Social Assimilation and Labor Market Outcomes of Migrants in China (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unm:unumer:2020051

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ad Notten ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).