Conference Agenda

This paper quantifies the impact of rural–urban migration on agricultural fires, a major source of air pollution in China, by combining satellite remote sensing records with population census data. We leverage an exogenous trade shock that increased manufacturing labor demand in destination prefectures, which drew workers from origin counties through established migration networks. We find that a one percentage point increase in rural labor emigration in a county in 2010 led to a 5% rise in agricultural fires from 2011 to 2017. This effect is driven by reduced agricultural labor, which incentivizes fire use as a labor–saving land–clearing method. Empirical evidence supports this mechanism, showing no significant effects from non–agricultural labor emigration or migration to nearby areas where return farming remains feasible, and the most pronounced impact during peak harvest seasons. Having uncovered this unintended environmental externality of rural–urban migration, we demonstrate that institutional reforms, such as recent land titling programs, mitigate the issue due to their potential to facilitate efficient farmland reallocation and promote large–scale farming during labor outflows, proving more effective than nationwide administrative bans on open-field burning.