SMU SOE Seminar Series (February 27, 2026): Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Uneven Impact of Land Reform

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ABSTRACT

We study how reducing mobility barriers from land-market frictions affects men and women differently, exploiting two major Chinese land reforms that strengthened rental rights. Using large-language-model text analysis, we map the reforms’ rollout to build a county-level reform index. Linking this index to panel data, we find that the reforms move rural women out of agriculture more than men and reduce urban women’s employment and wages relative to men. Embedding the reform index into a two-sector model with household-level decisions shows that land reforms interact with gender roles to generate these uneven impacts and raise non-farm employment and agricultural productivity.

Keywords: Land, Labor Mobility, Gender, Structural Transformation.

JEL: O11, E24, J61, J22, J16.

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