This article finds empirical evidence supporting the view that the decision to migrate by Chinese rural people is affected by noneconomic forces. Although migration yields a large monetary premium, rural people generally choose rural nonfarm work over migration. These findings are obtained by analyzing the migration behavior of rural people and their earnings, using a 1995 household survey from rural Sichuan province-the most populous and predominantly rural province in China. This article is organized as follows. Section II briefly describes the historical and institutional background of the recent wave of labor migration in China. The household survey and the basic characteristics of migrants and nonmigrants are described in Section III. Probability models describing occupational choice and emphasizing the role of schooling are presented in Section IV. I first present a binomial probability model describing how the leave-or-stay decision is made, and then I extend the scope of analysis to present a multiple choice model by dividing stayers into rural nonfarm and farm workers. In Section V, I estimate earnings differences between migrant and rural nonfarm workers, using a household earnings accounting model and then try to explain the earnings difference that is not accountable by explicit costs of migration. In Section VI, I summarize the article and discuss some implications of the findings.
