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The Impact of China's New Rural Pension Scheme on Farmland Transfer: From Relational Exchanges to Formal Market Contracts

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  • Zhang, Jingna

Abstract

Can a public pension change how rural households transfer farmland? We study China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), exploiting its age-60 eligibility threshold in a fuzzy regressiondiscontinuity design applied to three waves of the China Family Panel Studies (2014–2018), with identification coming from individual older-member pension receipt. Pension receipt raises the probability that a household rents out farmland, and the response is concentrated entirely on market-oriented transfer: paid rental-out rises sharply while zero-rent rental-out, a proxy for nonmonetized relational transfer, does not move. The market-side response is largest among households with the weakest cultural and structural ties to kin and village, for whom relational transfer carries the lowest implicit cost. The estimates are robust to controls for child remittance, off-farm labor, and non-farm income, and we find no contemporaneous discontinuity in private kin transfers. Pension income thus does more than relax the household budget: it shifts the institutional form of land transfer from relational support toward market-oriented exchange. Social insurance, in this setting, operates as a land-market institution.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhang, Jingna, 2026. "The Impact of China's New Rural Pension Scheme on Farmland Transfer: From Relational Exchanges to Formal Market Contracts," 2026 Annual Meeting, July 26 - 28, 2026, Kansas City, Missouri 404387, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:aaea26:404387
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.404387
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