Housing property rights and social integration of migrant population: based on the 2017 china migrants' dynamic survey

TL;DR

This study examines how housing property rights influence social integration among migrants in China, revealing that rural property ownership hampers integration and high urban house prices can reduce migrants' social cohesion.

Contribution

It introduces a novel perspective by measuring reverse push and pull forces of housing rights on migration, using empirical models on large survey data.

Findings

Rural property rights negatively affect social, cultural, and psychological integration.

Urban house prices have an inverted U-shaped effect on social integration.

Housing property rights create inverse push and pull forces influencing migration decisions.

Abstract

Push-pull theory, one of the most important macro theories in demography, argues that population migration is driven by a combination of push (repulsive) forces at the place of emigration and pull (attractive) forces at the place of emigration. Based on the push-pull theory, this paper shows another practical perspective of the theory by measuring the reverse push and pull forces from the perspective of housing property rights. We use OLS and sequential Probit models to analyze the impact of urban and rural property rights factors on the social integration of the migrant population-based, on "China Migrants' Dynamic Survey". We found that after controlling for personal and urban characteristics, there is a significant negative effect of rural property rights (homestead) ownership of the mobile population on their socio-economic integration, and cultural and psychological integration in the inflow area. The effect of urban house price on social integration of the migrant population is consistent with the "inverted U-shaped" nonlinear assumption: when the house price to income ratio of the migrant population in the inflow area increases beyond the inflection point, its social integration level decreases. That is, there is an inverse push force and pull force mechanism of housing property rights on population mobility.