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Using the 2014 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, we analyze rural–urban migrant workers' destination choices after the global financial crisis, with an emphasis on jobs, amenities, and local spillovers. By using an equilibrium‐sorting model, this paper disentangles local spillovers from local attributes in the estimation process. We employ both an artificial instrumental variable and the provincial highway passenger flow in 1979 to tackle the endogeneity issue. After controlling for the network effects of migrants from the same origin, we find a separate and strong preference for colocating with a large population of migrants, regardless of origin. The results remain robust when we take into account labor supply‐driven migration, spatial autocorrelation between provinces, different industry definitions, and regional differences within provinces. Our results imply that due to institutional barriers, the rural‐migrant community will still be a very important factor in the foreseeable future. In addition, as the ongoing industrial upgrading and transfer policies in China may lead to a westward movement of rural–urban migrants, the movement will be expedited when the older, less educated, or lower income migrants relocate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on micro-level data to fully inform the debate on decentralization and regional development. Using labor-income trajectories of emigrants from Mexico City, the paper analyzes how the labor market in a regional city, Leon, evolves. Results from the econometric model suggest that migrants’ labor-income trajectories differ between the large agglomeration and the regional city in an early stage of the evolution of the labor market, but converge in a later stage. Specifically, the slope of the earning function for recent migrants is steeper and statistically different from the slope for early migrants. The findings presented in this paper enrich the existing theory by providing microfoundations to a typically macroeconomic area of research and enable policy makers to better understand the processes underpinning the evolution of regional labor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper's model, undocumented workers are endogenously sorted into secondary labor markets. When further illegal immigration occurs, some new migrants follow their fellows into already migrant-dominated jobs, lowering migrant wages and raising real incomes of host-country labor and capital. Some submarkets switch from employing legal workers to employing migrants, lowering demand for and wages of legal workers. Undocumented immigration is Pareto-improving when enforcement reserves primary-sector jobs for legal workers. Pareto-dominant policies target the number of migrant-dominated submarkets, not the number of migrants. This appears consistent with U.S. enforcement practices. The effects of deportations, employer sanctions, and amnesties are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]