Environmental regulation and rural migrant workers' job quality: Evidence from China migrants dynamic surveys

Environmental regulation is an essential policy tool to curb environmental pollution, promote green and low-carbon transformation, and achieve the economic and social benefits of environmental policy under China's strategic goal of high-quality economic development. However, whether environmental regulation will promote rural migrant workers' job quality while improving the environmental quality has become a piv-otal issue in achieving this goal. Based on theoretical analysis and data from the 2016-2018 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, this study explored how environmental regulations help solve ecological issues and improve job quality by estimating the influence of environmental regulation on the job quality of rural migrant workers, its mechanisms, and its heterogeneous effects on intergenerational differences based on gender, educational level, and spouse's registered residence. The results showed that environmental regulation significantly improves the job quality of rural migrant workers. This positive effect can be explained by industrial structure upgrading and industrial digital transformation accelerated by environmental policies under China's national economic development strategy. Further analysis indicated that heterogeneity exists between generations. The impact of environmental regulation on the job quality of the traditional generation (i.e., migrant workers born prior to the 1978 economic reform and opening of China) is more significant than that of the new generation (i.e., those born after 1978) for males, undergraduate or junior college educational level, and spouse with a local registered residence. However, environmental regulation substantially affects the job quality of the new generation more than that of the traditional generation in terms of females, educational level of high school or below, and non-local spouses. Our findings have implications for the Chinese government's formulation of differential employment policies for rural migrant workers.(c) 2023 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.