Consumption norm assimilation and the migrant propensity to consume in Chinese supercities

Internal migrants in China’s largest cities earn about as much as local residents, yet spend a smaller share locally. The gap is demographic as much as economic. We ask how local embeddedness shapes that share and formalize the mechanism as consumption norm assimilation, in which migrants converge toward host-city norms by contact and internalization. Using 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey data on eight supercities, we take residence-permit holding and kin-accompanied first migration as instruments for local embeddedness, a standardized index of social participation, cultural adaptation, and psychological belonging. A one-standard-deviation increase raises the propensity to consume by 6.1% points, or 8.2 conditional on income. Both channels are active, and embeddedness raises engagement with local unions and native-place associations, so assimilation enlarges rather than replaces the migrant’s reference set. Family stage moves that propensity more immediately, and bringing a pre-school child raises it by 4.1 points, the largest family-stage estimate.