The Effect Of Psychological Capital On Wages Of Rural-to-urban Migrants

Since the reform and opening up, the process of industrialization and urbanization has beendeepened in China. The number of the rural-to-urban migrants becomes lager and their worksshift from agriculture to non-agricultural industries. At the end of2013, the number of China’srural migrant labor force has reached nearly269million. The increasingly large group ofmigrant workers has become an important and indispensable part of China’s industrial workers,but migrant workers has been difficult to integrate into the city. In addition, migrant workers’low income and social status shows a weak connection with their number. Because workingoutside of their hometown for a long time and experiencing the gap between reality and dreams,migrant workers has faced many challenges in mental health, which has become a social andacademic concern.In order to make an empirical analysis of the impact of migrant workers’ psychologicalcapital on wages, based on the Chinese Rural Labor Mobility Survey data (RUMIC), this paperbuilt a multiple regression equation and took control of key variables in the equation andshowed that psychological capital had a significant positive impact on wages of migrantworkers. According to the discovery, we further observed the presence of heterogeneity ofmigrant workers and searched the different impact of psychological capital on wages amonggroups of migrant workers with different characteristics. Moreover, considering differentdimensions of the concept of psychological capital, the heterogeneity of psychological capitalwas studied further in this article. According to the Psychological Capital Scale which wascreated by Luthans et al.(2005), psychological capital was conducted with four dimensions(self-efficacy, hope, resilience and optimism), the study showed that self-efficacy and hope arethe main internal driving force for migrant workers’ wages.Finally, around of the issue that how migrant workers have high psychological capital, thispaper made some suggestions for the government, enterprises and migrant workers.