Effects of human capital difference on migration destination preference of rural floating population in China

This paper first constructs a theoretical framework to investigate rural migrants’ preference for large cities or small and medium-sized cities as migration destinations. Then, we employ a nested logit model to empirically examine the effects of migration cost and benefit on the probability of migration to different types of cities. Our results suggest that since large cities provide more job opportunities and higher net migration benefit compared with small- and medium-sized cities, rural migrants with relatively high skills are more likely to move to large cities. Although the effects of migration cost and benefit on migration destination decisions are both significant, the effect of migration benefit outweighs that of migration cost. Hence, gaining net migration benefit is the main reason that rural migrants prefer to move to cities, especially to large cities.