Heterogeneous Impact of Social Integration on the Health of Rural-to-Urban Migrants in China.

Background: While several studies have found that lower levels of social integration may lead to a deterioration in the health status of migrants, previous research on the nexus between social integration and health has generally ignored the potential endogeneity of social integration. This paper examines the heterogeneous impact of social integration on the health of rural-to-urban migrants in China by exploiting plausibly exogenous, long-term, geographic variation in dialectal diversity.

Methods: Drawing on nationally representative data from the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey (n = 117,446), we first regressed self-reported health on social integration using ordinary least squares estimation and then used an ordered probit model as a robustness check.