Telecommunication externality on migration: Evidence from Chinese villages

•Access to landline phones boosts the out-migrant ratio by 2 percentage points.•Mechanism one is information access on job opportunities.•Mechanism two is timely contact with left-behind family members.•There is positive migration externality of expanding telecom in rural areas.

We use a unique data set of Chinese villages to investigate whether access to telecommunications, in particular, landline phones, increases the likelihood of outmigration. By using regional and time variations in the installation of landline phones, our difference-in-difference estimation shows that the access to landline phones increases the ratio of out-migrant workers by 2 percentage points, or about 51% of the sample mean in China. The results remain robust to a battery of validity checks. Furthermore, landline phones affect outmigration through two channels: information access on job opportunities and especially timely contact with left-behind family members. Our findings underscore the positive migration externality of expanding telecommunications access in rural areas, especially in places where migration potential is large.