| Abstract: |
How the income of "relevant others" affects well-being has received renewed
interest in the recent literature using subjective data. Migrants constitutes
a par- ticularly interesting group to study this question: as they changed
environment, they are likely to be concerned by several potential reference
groups including the people "left behind", other migrants and "natives". We
focus here on the huge population of rural-to-urban migrants in China. We
exploit a novel dataset that comprises samples of migrants and urban people
living in the same cities, as well as rural households mostly surveyed in the
provinces where migrants are coming from. After establishing these links, we
fi
nd that the well-being of migrants is largely af- fected by relative
concerns: results point to negative relative concerns toward other migrants
and workers of home regions - this status effect is particularly strong for
migrants who wish to settle permanently in cities. We fi
nd in contrast a
positive relative income effect vis-à-vis the urban reference group,
interpreted as a signal effect: larger urban incomes indicate higher income
prospects for the migrants. A richer pattern is obtained when sorting migrants
according to the duration of stay, expectations to return to home countries
and characteristics related to family cir- cumstances, work conditions and
community ties. |