How Intergenerational Mobility Shapes Migrant Workers’ Job Quality: Empirical Evidence from China

As a crucial indicator for measuring regional social equity and equality of opportunity, intergenerational mobility exerts an important impact on the employment quality of the agricultural migrant population. However, despite extensive research on migrant employment, limited attention has been paid to how intergenerational mobility interacts with localized technological environments and fiscal resource constraints to shape the labor assimilation of rural-to-urban migrants. This study assesses this relationship by constructing an urban intergenerational educational mobility index and analyzing the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) data. The results indicate that intergenerational mobility significantly improves the employment quality of the migrant population. Mechanism analysis was used to reveal that the digital economy exerts a positive regulatory effect, acting as a form of technological empowerment that enhances the transition of structural opportunities into tangible employment prospects. Conversely, local fiscal pressure exerts a negative regulatory effect, imposing contractive resource constraints that attenuate the promotional dividends of social mobility. Heterogeneity analysis results further demonstrate that the positive impact of intergenerational mobility is more prominent in cities with higher public education expenditure, higher levels of marketization, and fewer traditional cultural constraints. These findings suggest that geographical mobility alone does not automatically guarantee high-quality employment; rather, enhancing institutional openness, expanding digital infrastructure, and optimizing the allocation of public resources are essential to translating equity of structural opportunity into decent work.