How do institutions and human capital impact the homeownership in China: Skilled migrants vs labor migrants

This paper examines how human capital and institutional factors shapes homeownership disparities between skilled and labor migrants in host city in China. We analyze how human capital and institutional factors ( hukou and danwei ) exert influence on skilled and labor migrants seeking homeownership. We introduce a theoretical framework that includes social demographic factors, family factors, employment factors, institutional factors, and urban factors impacting migrant homeownership. Using the pooled cross-sectional data of China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) from 2010 to 2017, we build a binary probit regression and the Shapley decomposition method to examine how the mentioned factors influence migrant homeownership. Next, we compare labor and skilled migrants and find that human capital differences are the main cause of the housing inequality for migrants, and that such inequality is intensified by the screening mechanism of institutions and markets. Last, our time trend analysis shows that, although institutional factors are weakening, their negative impacts on labor migrants remain significant.