城镇化安置会带来更高的主观福祉吗?OACHSSCD

Within the policy framework of the Poverty Alleviation Relocation(PAR)program,enabling households to relocate successfully represents the initial objective,ensuring that relocated households can settle sustainably constitutes the central task of the current policy stage,and achieving long-term income growth is the ultimate goal.After the first objective has largely been achieved,promoting sustainable settlement has become the key focus of post-relocation support and an essential foundation for realizing long-term income growth.This requires close attention to changes in relocated residents' subjective well-being across different settlement locations and the design of targeted measures to enhance their sense of gain and happiness.At the same time,the program's diversified urban-rural settlement locations provide a valuable empirical setting to examine the welfare disparities between urban and rural areas and to assess the welfare effects of population migration from villages to cities. Using three waves of survey data collected in 2016,2017,and 2021 by Renmin University of China and the former State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development,this paper employs a staggered difference-in-differences approach to examine the effects of different urban-rural resettlement locations on the subjective well-being of relocated households.Using life satisfaction as a proxy for subjective well-being,the results show that poverty alleviation relocation significantly improves the subjective well-being of relocated households.The effect is significantly stronger for households resettled in county seats,while township and rural resettlement also improve subjective well-being but to a lesser extent,with no significant difference between the latter two.The results remain robust after applying robust estimators for heterogeneous treatment effects,conducting parallel-trend tests,and restricting the treatment group to households whose resettlement locations were not self-selected. Mechanism analyses suggest that disparities in access to education and healthcare are key factors driving the heterogeneity in treatment effects across settlement locations.Households relocated to county-level resettlement benefit from superior public service provisions,contributing to their higher reported life satisfaction.By contrast,alternative pathways such as non-agricultural employment opportunities and digital information accessibility exhibit negligible explanatory power,highlighting the welfare-enabling role of public services. The paper further examines heterogeneity in the effects of relocation and resettlement policies across different individual characteristics and origin-area characteristics.In terms of individual characteristics,households with members of middle-school age experience larger gains in life satisfaction under county-seat resettlement,and respondents with chronic diseases also show stronger improvements in life satisfaction when resettled in county seats,both of which are consistent with the findings from the mechanism analysis.County-seat resettlement is also more effective in enhancing life satisfaction for households with single members.Compared with Han households,ethnic minority households gain more in life satisfaction from relocation overall;however,the effect of county-seat resettlement is weaker for them than that of township and rural resettlement.Overall,the positive effect of relocation on life satisfaction declines with age,whereas the effect of county-seat resettlement follows a positive U-shaped pattern across age groups.The study also finds that although origin-village characteristics have an important influence on the life satisfaction of relocated households,they cannot explain the differences in effects across county-seat,township,and rural resettlement. Compared with existing studies,this paper makes three main contributions.First,by exploiting the PAR program as a quasi-natural experiment and leveraging variation in urban-rural settlement locations,we identify the causal effect of population urbanization on rural households' subjective well-being,thereby alleviating the endogeneity concerns that have limited prior research.Second,we extend the literature on poverty alleviation relocation by systematically comparing the effects of different settlement locations on life satisfaction,showing that county-level resettlement outperforms township and rural resettlement,while the latter two yield similar policy impacts.Third,within the capability approach framework,we examine the mechanisms through which urban resettlement affects life satisfaction and identify access to education and healthcare public services as the key channel.Accordingly,this paper proposes policy recommendations for improving public service provision in rural and township settlement locations,promoting the social integration of relocated households,strengthening the role of county seats as key platforms of urbanization,and addressing remaining gaps in public services.