title: Health Consequences of Rural-to-Urban Migration: Evidence from Panel Data in China.
abstract: This paper provides new empirical evidence on the health consequences of rural-to-urban migration in China. We use a panel dataset from 2003 to 2006 constructed by the Research Center on the Rural Economy at the Ministry of Agriculture in China to investigate the effects of short-term and medium-term migration on health status. By combining propensity-score matching and the difference-in-difference model, we attempt to overcome the migration endogeneity issue and estimate the average treatment effect on the treated. We find that the effect of short-term migration on health in China is significantly positive mostly because of the income effect. However, the effect of longer-term continuous migration on health is insignificant and close to zero. Our results are robust to several alternative estimation techniques and a series of robustness checks. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
authors.affiliation: School of Economics, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: School of Economics, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Wenkai
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Sun
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002681:China; D003710:Demography / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D004651:Employment; D005260:Female; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011157:Population Dynamics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D057216:Propensity Score; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
keywords: average treatment effect on the treated; difference-in-difference model; health; migration; propensity score matching