Abstract：With the gradual relaxation of restrictions on urban household registration， the recent phenomena of “anti-urbanization” and “reversed household registration discrimination” are obviously contrary to the existing theoretical cognition of urbanization. Therefore， this paper adopts the methods of counterfactual analysis， Brown decomposition and instrumental variables to explore the correlative logic between the urbanization of migrant workers and their employment situations， and finds that the “reversed household registration discrimination” does occur between urban and rural laborers， and migrant workers’ residence intention is an important reason for this change in household registration discrimination. Further mechanism analysis shows that non-discriminatory economic factors reduce migrant workers’ residence intention. The consequential involution of social identity drives migrant workers to aim at “making more money” and prefer to choose industries with poor working conditions in order to obtain higher compensatory wages， so they earn more than urban laborors. It leads to the “reverse of household registration discrimination”.
2022, Vol. 61 
