"This dissertation consists of three essays discussing the migration issue in China. Each chapter employs empirical and quantitative applied microeconomics methods. The first chapter studies the impact of the public school enrollment restriction on migrant children in China. Migrant children are disadvantaged and sometimes cannot enroll in public schools in migration destinations due to some policy restrictions. Some migrant workers have to leave their children behind in their hometowns, which causes the left-behind children problem. In this study, I first identify the peer effects of migrant children and left-behind children on their classmates using classroom random assignment. I then analyze the human capital consequences of the enrollment restriction on migrant students within a spatial equilibrium model. My results show that there are negative spillovers from migrant and left-behind students. The negative effect is generally larger from left-behind students, but both shrink over time. In the counterfactual analysis, I find that if the enrollment restriction on migrant children is relaxed, migration of parents and children will increase, and the average human capital in the society will also increase. Low-skill families from small cities benefit most. This policy increases human capital mainly through two channels. First, it directly increases enrollment in good public schools and alleviates the left-behind children problem. Second, it attracts more parents to take their left-behind children to migrate with them and indirectly reduces the total spillovers. This is the first formal quantitative analysis of public school enrollment policy in China. The second chapter studies the role of migration and housing constraints in determining income inequality within and across Chinese cities. Combining microdata and a spatial equilibrium model, we quantify the impact of the massive spatial reallocation of workers and the rapid growth of housing costs on the national income distribution. We first show several stylized facts detailing the strong positive correlation between migration inflows, housing costs, and imputed income inequality among Chinese cities. We then build a spatial equilibrium model featuring workers with heterogeneous skills, housing constraints, and heterogeneous returns from housing ownership to explain these facts. Our quantitative results indicate that the reductions in migration costs and the disproportionate growth in productivity across cities and skills result in the observed massive migration flows. Combining with the tight land supply policy in big cities, the expansion of the housing demand causes the rapid growth of housing costs, and enlarges the inequality between local housing owners and migrants. The counterfactual analysis shows that if we redistribute land supply increment by migrant flow and increase land supply toward cities with more migrants, we could lower the within-city income inequality by 14% and the national income inequality by 18%. Meanwhile, we can simultaneously encourage more migration into higher productivity cities. The third chapter studies the effects of both the number and the gender of children on rural-to-urban parental migration in China. We propose a new semiparametric method to solve an identification difficulty in previous studies and estimate the two effects separately at the same time. We find that having more children promotes rural-to-urban parental migration. Moreover, parents respond more significantly to the presence of boys than to the presence of girls. Without considering the effect of child gender, the instrumental variable estimate for the effect of children number will be strongly downward biased and result in a misleading policy implication"--Pages ix-xi.

Many of the individuals who migrate are parents who leave their children behind. The third chapter ("Migration and Children's Welfare in China: Schooling and Health of Children Left Behind") studies the impact of parental absence due to migration on the well-being of children. I find that parental absence has negative effects on the amount of schooling that children receive.

China has experienced dramatic increase in interregional migration flows since the 1990s, in which rural-urban movements have accounted for a large proportion. The consistently rising number of rural famers moving to urban areas for off-farm employment opportunities stimulates the farmland transfers through a land rental market. Traditional agricultural behaviors may be affected with more land being rented out as well as the growing concern about the tenure security. The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the driving factors of interregional migration and how the adoption of straw retention, a typical conservation practice, is influenced under different land tenure categories in the context of China. The first essay explores the role of local climate conditions in spurring migration over the period 2000 to 2010. I develop a robust empirical approach to measure the relative importance to migration of two categories of variables, including natural amenities and economic factors. I also construct a disaggregated prefecture level panel data set which allows accounting for both within province migration flows and prefecture-specific characteristics such as the Hukou policy. Empirical findings generated from a correlated random effects (CRE) model reveal that climate conditions are important determinants of migration in China. Specifically, prefectures with warmer winter, cooler summer, and more available sunshine are more attractive to migrants. Economic factors such as income level and employment opportunities are also important drivers of population growth.