Rural-Urban Migration and Control Theory

Urbanization, Rural–urban Migration and Urban Poverty

Urbanization and Rural-Urban Migration

This chapter considers the literature on urbanization and migration to cities from rural areas in developing and middle-income countries. The chapter assesses recent patterns, discusses traditional models, addresses more recent models of migration, presents some of the recent findings from the micro-econometric literature, and closes with a discussion of the role of cities in economic growth. C...

Heterogeneous Firms and Rural-urban Migration Heterogeneous Firms and Rural-urban Migration

We construct a general equilibrium model of urban unemployment with a continuum of heterogeneous urban firms producing differentiated products in a monopolistic competitive market. We show that an increase in urban institutionally fixed minimum wage reduces urban aggregate output and each urban firm will experience an output cut proportional to the change in aggregate output. However, such prop...

Life Earnings and Rural-Urban Migration

This paper is a theoretical study of rural-urban migration—urbanization—as it has occurred in many low-income economies in the postwar period. This process is viewed as a transfer of labor from a traditional, land-intensive technology to a human capital–intensive technology with an unending potential for growth. The model emphasizes the role of cities as places in which new immigrants can accum...

Rural-Urban Migration and Socioeconomic Mobility

I would like to thank my advisors, Joel Mokyr, Joe Ferrie, and Joe Altonji, for their helpful comments. I also benefited from conversations with Henry Siu, Jim Sullivan and Chris Taber, and from input from workshop participants at Northwestern University and participants of the 2002 All-UC Group in Economic History Conference and the 2002 Cliometrics Conference. Justin Hayes and Humphrey Southa...