Three Essays on Interregional Migration and the Adoption of Straw Retention in Chin

China has experienced dramatic increase in interregional migration flows since the 1990s, in which rural-urban movements have accounted for a large proportion. The consistently rising number of rural famers moving to urban areas for off-farm employment opportunities stimulates the farmland transfers through a land rental market. Traditional agricultural behaviors may be affected with more land being rented out as well as the growing concern about the tenure security. The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the driving factors of interregional migration and how the adoption of straw retention, a typical conservation practice, is influenced under different land tenure categories in the context of China.;The first essay explores the role of local climate conditions in spurring migration over the period 2000 to 2010. I develop a robust empirical approach to measure the relative importance to migration of two categories of variables, including natural amenities and economic factors. I also construct a disaggregated prefecture level panel data set which allows accounting for both within province migration flows and prefecture-specific characteristics such as the Hukou policy. Empirical findings generated from a correlated random effects (CRE) model reveal that climate conditions are important determinants of migration in China. Specifically, prefectures with warmer winter, cooler summer, and more available sunshine are more attractive to migrants. Economic factors such as income level and employment opportunities are also important drivers of population growth.;The second essay attempts to assess the interregional migration response to local employment growth over 2000-2005 and 2005-2010 periods. To identify the causal effect of employment growth on migration, I construct the industry mix employment growth as the identifying instrument. I also employ a disaggregated dataset consisting of 262 prefecture level cities that provides more cross-sectional variation. A series of cross-sectional instrument variable (IV) regressions results coupled with sensitivity checks, reveals that interregional migration response to employment growth is positively significant in both two periods after 2000, and migration appears to be the dominant adjusting mechanism in Chinese labor market with a greater share of response over time than the internal sources.;The third essay aims to examine how land tenure arrangements affect Chinese farmers' adoption of straw retention, a critical conservation practice that has been supported by the Chinese government. Using data from a household survey in Henan Province in central China, I construct a dataset of 1,659 plot-level observations and each cultivated plot is classified into two tenure types, own contracted versus rented plots. Empirical findings based on several logit regressions reveal that, after controlling for crop choice, harvest season, spatial climate and other plot-level and household-level covariates, a rented plot is associated with a 13.2 percentage reduction in the probability of adopting straw retention after harvest throughout 2015. The findings are of great importance for policy implications since Chinese government has been promoting the development of the rural land rental market under the context of increasing rural-urban migration.