Sowing Seeds of Mobility

We study the uneven impacts of reducing mobility barriers arising from land market frictions by leveraging two major land reforms that strengthened land rental rights in China. We construct a novel county-level reform index by tracing the reforms’ spatial and temporal rollout. Combining this index with a large panel dataset, we show that, relative to men, the reforms facilitate rural women’s transition out of agriculture while reducing urban women’s employment and wage income. We embed the reform index in a two-sector model with household-level employment decisions. Interactions between land market frictions and gender roles in market and home production drive these uneven impacts. Counterfactual analyses suggest that alleviating these frictions substantially affects female labor allocation and agricultural productivity.