Home sweet home: Impacts of living conditions on worker migration with evidence from randomized resettlement in China

Growing concerns over family separations draw renewed attention to temporary work migration and the factors shaping it. We leverage the randomized timing in a Chinese re-housing initiative, the Poverty Alleviation Resettlement (PAR) program, to shed light on the impact of rural living conditions on temporary labor migration. Applying a difference-in-differences framework to three waves of panel data (2016, 2017, 2019), we estimate impacts of re-housing on labor out-migration. Results reveal that improved housing decreased the propensity to send out migrant workers, particularly for young parents and households with dependents, with important implications for the rural left-behind.