Title: Rural-Urban Migration and Market Integration

Speaker: Dr. Wei Lin, Assistant Professor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Host: Dr. Yige Duan, Assistant Professor, Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Time: 14:00–15:30, Saturday, April 11, 2026

Venue: Venue: Room B716, Antai College of Economics and Management, Xuhui Campus, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Brief introduction of the content: 

We combine a new collection of microdata from China with a natural policy experiment to investigate the extent to which reductions in rural-urban migration barriers affect flows of trade and investments between cities and the countryside. We find that  increases in worker eligibility for urban residence registration (Hukou) across origin- destination pairs increase rural-urban exports, imports, capital inflows and outflows,  both in terms of bilateral transaction values and the number of unique buyer-seller matches. To quantify the implications at the regional level, we interpret these estimates through the lens of a spatial equilibrium model in which migrants can reduce buyer- seller matching frictions. We find that a 10% increase in a rural county’s migration market access on average leads to a 1.5% increase in the county’s trade market access and  a 2% increase in investment market access. In the context of China’s recent Hukou reforms, we find that these knock-on effects on market integration were on average larger among the urban destinations compared to the rural origins, reinforcing incentives for rural-urban migration.

Speaker's profile:

Wei Lin is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2022.  His research interests include learning and matching frictions in technology adoption, migration market, and firm-to-firm network.

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