Zhou, Ling (2021) Essays in Development Economics: Migration and Identity in China. Toulouse School of Economics (Toulouse).

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Abstract

Human behaviors are usually affected by social environment and policies or rules imposed by the governors. Nowadays we observe an increase in interactions between different communities around the world, partly as a result of transportation development and economic integration. Identity as a product of social environment becomes the link or tool for cooperation and confrontation in these interactions. Migration shaped by policies or rules also attracts increasing attention for the opportunities, problems, and conflicts that it brings to different areas involved. It is thus important to understand how identity affects group interactions and how migration is affected by policies or rules. What researchers often neglect is that the policy or regulation impact can be shaped by multiple interacted channels at the same time. For Chapter 1, titled “Favoring your in-group can harm both them and you: ethnicity and public goods provision in China”, with my coauthors César Mantilla, Charlotte Wang, Donghui Yang, and Suping Shen, and Paul Seabright, we conducted lab-in-the-field experiments in Xishuangbanna, home to 25 out of 55 official Chinese ethnic minorities. We find that participants in trust games send around 15% more to partners they know to be co-ethnics than to those whose ethnicity they do not know. Receivers’ behavior is determined by amounts received and not by perceived ethnicity. In line with the previous literature we find that subjects contribute more to public goods in ethnically homogeneous groups than in mixed groups. We find evidence for a new explanation that is not due to different intrinsic preferences for cooperation with ingroup and outgroup members. Instead, subjects’ willingness to punish in-group members for free-riding is reduced when out-group members are present. This leads to lower contributions and net earnings in mixed groups. Thus favoritism towards co-ethnics can hurt both those engaging in favoritism and those being favored. In Chapter 2, titled “Marriage, Migration, and Migration Policy: Evidence from Hukou Reform in China”, I focus on two questions. First, how much do marriage prospects affect individual’s migration choices? Second, how does marriage shape the effectiveness of migration policies? To study these questions, I develop a dynamic migration and marriage model where migration policies regulate migrant access to local benefits. I show that merit-based migration policies have very limited effects on migrant composition if we take into account the marital gains and spouse adjustments to policies. Empirically, I estimate the model using Chinese data. I first show that intermarriage opportunities drive 10% of migration of singles aged 20-35 in 2000. I then show that if migrants could obtain local hukou right after migration, the migrant inflows of young people to large cities would increase by 2 times in 2000. Neglecting the indirect policy impact through marriage markets, we would underestimate the migration of men by about 30% and of women by 40% in large cities. In Chapter 3, titled “Revealed or Forced: Migration Response to Pollution Disclosure”, co-authored with Zichen Deng, we examine the impact of pollution information disclosure on individual location responses to air pollution. The inference of information value can be misleading if we attribute the behavioral changes after information disclosure only to misperception. This paper studies the impact of an influential national air quality information disclosure program in China in 2013-2015 on individual migration responses to air pollution. Specifically, we exploit the roll-out of this program and the variation in regional initial pollution. The migration measures are obtained from detailed individual migration history in the Population Census 2015. We demonstrate that the resulting migration responses are not only due to changed perception of health risk […].

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