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Abstract
Early literature on development economics has documented that the growth path of most advanced economies was accompanied by a process of structural transformation: the real location of labor forces across sectors and regions. Despite the substantial rapid expansion of labor migration in the past decades, emerging economies like China, India, and Vietnam maintained disproportionate employment in agriculture compared to other countries at similar levels of per capita GDP. Therefore, understanding why does the agricultural sector hold so many workers and how do labor distortions households welfare, are especially pressing issues.My dissertation addresses these issues from three aspects using the evidence from China. The first chapter focuses on the non-separability between the land market and labor market, and explore whether the imperfection of land markets hinder rural labor migration. The second chapter sheds light on migrant workers' environmental concerns and links migration decision to the poor smog pollution. The last chapter discusses the impact of social isolation on the migrants' risky health behaviors such as smoking and explores the heterogeneous impact across gender.