Abstracts

China has experienced dramatic increase ininterregional migration flows since the 1990s, in which rural-urbanmovements have accounted for a large proportion. The consistentlyrising number of rural famers moving to urban areas for off-farmemployment opportunities stimulates the farmland transfers througha land rental market. Traditional agricultural behaviors may beaffected with more land being rented out as well as the growingconcern about the tenure security. The main objective of thisdissertation is to investigate the driving factors of interregionalmigration and how the adoption of straw retention, a typicalconservation practice, is influenced under different land tenurecategories in the context of China.The first essay explores therole of local climate conditions in spurring migration over theperiod 2000 to 2010. I develop a robust empirical approach tomeasure the relative importance to migration of two categories ofvariables, including natural amenities and economic factors. I alsoconstruct a disaggregated prefecture level panel data set whichallows accounting for both within province migration flows andprefecture-specific characteristics such as the Hukou policy.Empirical findings generated from a correlated random effects (CRE)model reveal that climate conditions are important determinants ofmigration in China. Specifically, prefectures with warmer winter,cooler summer, and more available sunshine are more attractive tomigrants. Economic factors such as income level and employmentopportunities are also important drivers of population growth.Thesecond essay attempts to assess the interregional migrationresponse to local employment growth over 2000-2005 and 2005-2010periods. To identify the causal effect of employment growth onmigration, I construct the industry mix employment growth as theidentifying instrument. I also employ a disaggregated datasetconsisting of 262 prefecture level cities that provides morecross-sectional variation. A series of cross-sectional instrumentvariable (IV) regressions results coupled with sensitivity checks,reveals that interregional migration response to employment growthis positively significant in both two periods after 2000, andmigration appears to be the dominant adjusting mechanism in Chineselabor market with a greater share of response over time than theinternal sources.The third essay aims to examine how land tenurearrangements affect Chinese farmers adoption of straw retention, acritical conservation practice that has been supported by theChinese government. Using data from a household survey in HenanProvince in central China, I construct a dataset of 1,659plot-level observations and each cultivated plot is classified intotwo tenure types, own contracted versus rented plots. Empiricalfindings based on several logit regressions reveal that, aftercontrolling for crop choice, harvest season, spatial climate andother plot-level and household-level covariates, a rented plot isassociated with a 13.2 percentage reduction in theAdvisors/Committee Members: Sam, Abdoul (Advisor).