The Impact of Rural Pensions in China on Labor Migration
利用断点回归分析发现，中国新农保使父母刚达养老金领取年龄的家庭中，成年子女更可能外出务工或从事非农工作，且对父母健康差的子女影响更大，表明养老金缓解了照料老人对劳动力迁移的约束。
We study the impact of China’s new rural pension program on promoting migration of labor by applying a regression discontinuity analysis to this new pension program. The results reveal a perceptible difference in labor migration among adult children whose parents are just above and below the age of pension eligibility: The adult children with a parent just attaining the pension-eligible age are more likely to be labor migrants compared with those with a parent just below the pension-eligible age. We also find that with a pension-eligible parent, the adult children are more likely to have off-farm jobs. These abrupt changes in household behavior at the cutoff suggest that these households are credit constrained. In addition, we find that the pension’s effect on migration is greater among adult children with a parent in poor health; pension-eligible elderly report that they are more likely to use inpatient services when needed and less likely to rely on adult children for care when they are ill. These results suggest that (expectations regarding) providing care for elderly parents has constrained labor migration from China's rural areas to some extent, and that the new rural pension program has helped to relax this constraint.