SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2026)

Friday, November 6, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Rural-Urban Migration and Market Integration

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.

About the Speaker 
 

Ming Li is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Her research interests cover topics of the Chinese economy, political economy, and urban economics. Her current research focuses on industrial policy, internal migration and trade, and the political economy of firm dynamics in China. She received the Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Peking University and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu