IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp18569.html

Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Gendered Impact of Land Reform

Author

Listed:
  • Chen, Ting

    (Hong Kong Baptist University)

  • Gu, Jiajia

    (International Monetary Fund)

  • Ngai, L. Rachel

    (London School of Economics)

  • Wang, Jin

    (Hong Kong Unverity of Science and Technology)

Abstract

We study how land market frictions affect men and women differently during structural transformation, exploiting two major Chinese land reforms that strengthened farmers' rental rights. Using large-language-model text analysis, we construct a county-level reform index and combine it with large panel data to identify causal effects. The reforms shift rural women out of agriculture more than men and reduce urban women's employment and wages relative to men. A multisector model with intra-household labor allocation rationalizes these findings: gender-neutral land market frictions act as gender-specific mobility barriers, and their removal disproportionately accelerates women's transition into non-agricultural employment.

Suggested Citation

  • Chen, Ting & Gu, Jiajia & Ngai, L. Rachel & Wang, Jin, 2026. "Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Gendered Impact of Land Reform," IZA Discussion Papers 18569, IZA Network @ LISER.
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18569
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp18569.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18569. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mark Fallak (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaalu.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.