Homestead Withdrawal, Village Identity, and Farmers' Intentions to Migrate to Cities: Evidence From Jiangsu, China

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of concurrent land‐institution reform and the advancement of urbanization, clarifying how homestead withdrawal shapes rural households' migration behavior is crucial for improving the efficiency of urban–rural factor flows and enhancing the quality of urbanization. Using 6954 valid household survey responses collected in rural Jiangsu Province during 2021 to 2023, this study employs Probit models and the KHB decomposition method to examine the effect of homestead withdrawal on rural households' intentions to migrate to cities and the underlying mechanism operating through village identity. We obtain the following results. (1) Homestead withdrawal significantly increases rural households' willingness to migrate to cities, and this finding remains robust under a series of checks, including alternative variable specifications, subsample regressions, and instrumental‐variable approaches. (2) The effect is heterogeneous across groups and is more pronounced among households in northern Jiangsu and those with a higher share of non‐farm income. (3) Mechanism analysis indicates that homestead withdrawal primarily enhances migration willingness by weakening farmers' sense of identification with rural living conditions and social relationships. The overall mediating effect accounts for 30.77%, with the influence of residential environment identification being particularly pronounced. (4) Regarding destination choice, homestead withdrawal significantly increases the propensity to relocate to county seats or county‐level cities, highlighting counties as an increasingly central spatial platform for absorbing rural households into urban citizenship. These findings provide policy‐relevant evidence for economically developed regions to refine the homestead withdrawal system, promote nearby and in‐situ urbanization, and advance integrated urban–rural development, offering theoretical and policy implications for comparable regions.