Migration-Control Frictions and Job Quality: Evidence from China’s Hukou System

This working paper studies how migration-control institutions shape job quality after migration. It uses China’s hukou system as an internal migration-control regime, focusing on workers who have already moved and found employment but may still face restricted local incorporation.

Authors:

Xi Wang, Jiajing Sun, and Michael Cole.

Summary and Contribution:

The paper uses a 2009 survey of 2,398 non-local-hukou workers across 12 destination labor markets. Job quality is measured through five evaluations of the current job: overall satisfaction, income satisfaction, skill acquisition, potential realization, and working conditions.

The paper links hukou status, search resources, occupational sorting, self-employment, work intensity, and realized job quality. A search-and-sorting framework shows how migration-control frictions can affect migrants not only through employment or income, but also through the types of jobs they enter and the nonpecuniary quality of those jobs.

Evidence:

Destination-city fixed-effects estimates show that own income is positively related to satisfactory outcomes across all five job-quality domains. Self-employment is associated with lower overall satisfaction, weaker income satisfaction, lower skill acquisition, lower potential realization, and worse working conditions, despite higher average earnings among the self-employed.

Accounting for work intensity reduces the self-employment gap by 30 to 58 percent across domains, with daily hours carrying the mechanism. The pooled agricultural-hukou difference is small, but hukou status is visible in sorting margins and in hukou-specific gradients in city tenure, search resources, and relative income.

Keywords:

Internal migration; job quality; hukou; self-employment; search networks; China.

Recommended citation: Wang, X., Sun, J., & Cole, M. (2026). Migration-Control Frictions and Job Quality: Evidence from China’s Hukou System. Working paper.