The Impact Of Social Capital On The Performance Of Human Capital Investment Of Rural-ubran Migrant Workers

After obtaining the amazing economic growth, the Chinese economy is entering into the "new normal", which means that human capital is playing an increasingly important role in China’s economic development. Enhancing the human capital of rural-urban migrants who are an important component of industrial workers is not only conducive to the adaption of "new normal", but also to their urban integration and all-round development. However, the performance of migrant workers’ human capital investment is not optimistic, including the level of human capital as direct performance and the return on human capital as indirect performance. At the same time, China is a relationship oriented society. The role of social capital as the informal system is more outstanding, especially in the transformation process of formal institution. Therefore, the social capital of migrant workers inevitably has an important impact on their human capital investment and its performance.So we can’t help but wonder how do the migrant workers realize their human capital accumulation? Does the accumulation of migrant workers’ human capital get a reasonable return? Whether the migrant workers’ social capital plays an important role in that process? If so, what is the mechanism behind it? Whether the effect of migrant workers’ social capital is diverse in different dimensions? What’s the distinct effect between the rural and urban social capital of migrant workers?In order to solve these questions, this paper constructs the analysis frameworks based on the theory of social capital, the theory of human capital investment, Grossman health theory and labor market theory, to explore the mechanism that how does migrant workers’social capital affect their human capital investment performance. Then we test the hypothesis derived from the framework based on the survey data in 2014 and econometric methods. The main conclusions are as follows:Conclusion I:Migrant workers’ social capital obviously promotes the investment in the vocational skills and the level of professional skills, by effectively alleviating the constraints of the investment and reducing the investment risk. And migrant workers’ urban social capital has stronger effect on vocational level than rural social capital.Conclusion Ⅱ:Social capital of migrant workers significantly improves their health by easing of healthy investment constraints, strengthening healthy information transfer and relieving psychological pressure. In addition, the social network as structural social capital has more positive effects on migrant workers health, compared with the trust and reciprocity as cognitive social capital.Conclusion Ⅲ:Migrant workers’ social capital significantly improves the returns on human capital investment by alleviating the information asymmetry and employment discrimination in labor market. Moreover, the social network has more positive effects on the returns on human capital investment, compared with the trust and reciprocity. And migrant workers’ urban social capital has stronger effect on the returns on human capital investment than rural social capital.The enlightenment of the conclusions is that in the process of economic and social transformation, social capital can be positive role in migrant workers’ human capital investment performance beyond the market mechanism and redistribution system. But the social capital of the migrant workers still needs further development that not only the expansion of social network, also the strengthening of trust and reciprocity, not only rational use of rural social capital, also the shaping of urban social capital. This means we should accelerate the upgrading and reconstruction of migrant workers’ social capital through the new urbanization, rather than merely rest on the change of citizenship and type of occupation. Furthermore, that positive effect does not mean the complete replacement of the formal system by social capital. What’s need to do is that cherish the time window that social capital plays a positive role in the process of economic transformation, and optimize the corresponding formal systems to make them cooperate with each other.Compared with the previous studies, the features of this paper are as follows:the first is deepening the research content from the investment decision of vocational skills to the choice of investment ways and from the calculation of human capital return to the analysis of influencing factors. The second is the innovation of research perspective. This paper explores that how does the migrant workers’ social capital affect their human capital investment performance by integrating the social capital into the theory of human capital investment, Grossman healthy theory and labor market theory. Besides, this paper divides migrant workers’ social capital into different urban-rural sections and construal dimensions according to their actual situation and social capital theory. The third is the optimization of research method. This paper test the endogeneity of migrant workers’ social capital by Ⅳ-Probit model and control the interference of extreme value which are the common problem in income research.