neither available nor understandable to migrant workers.<sup>7</sup> As an example of program complexities, Appendix A.2 summarizes information on the costs and benefits of health insurance and pensions for two of the 13 cities in which the information intervention was implemented.<sup>8</sup> These **_simplified_** policy details were summarized after a careful reading of the city-level websites and confirmed with follow-up phone conversations with city-level bureaucrats charged with managing the programs. In the face of such complexity and incomplete information, migrants are left to make uninformed decisions. Combined with short time horizons in the city, they may find it easier to opt out, especially when employers offer to collude with employees to avoid participating. Further, nearly a third of migrants are self-employed and the costs of participating for this group are even higher as they must make both the employer and employee contributions.

Finally, even as bringing rural residents into urban social insurance schemes is an explicit policy objective, existing rural programs may be viewed as substitutes for “expensive” urban insurance schemes. With respect to health insurance, 81 percent of rural migrants in the baseline (2015) survey were enrolled in the New Rural Collective Medical System (NRCMS) program. Even as it is a highly imperfect substitute for coverage through the urban employee health insurance program, the existence of this alternative may contribute to delays in enrolling in the urban program.

In this paper, we examine migrant participation in urban health insurance and pension schemes. The two programs have been available to employed registered residents of the city since the 1990s, but have only encouraged participation of rural-urban migrants since the New Labor Contract Law in 2008. Although the programs vary significantly in terms of premia and benefits across cities, all cities required joint employer-employee contributions to these programs at the time of the information intervention. With respect to the urban employee health insurance program, nominal employee and employer contributions average 2% and 6%, respectively. The urban employee pension scheme has a greater burden, with individuals contributing at least 8% of their monthly earnings while employers contribute 1421% of the average wage in the firm. At retirement, only those workers who have contributed for at least 15 years may receive a full pension that includes employer contributions. Those workers who have contributed for less than 15 years may still receive a lump sum payment from their own accummulated contributions, but they will not receive a pension payment, nor the employers’ contribution, which will remain with the city pension authorities.

> 7When designing this intervention, one of the co-authors put in considerable effort to find details on policies and procedures for each of the 15 RUMiC cities. Apart from Guangzhou, Dongguan and Shenzhen, website information for other cities was either not up-to-date or difficult to understand. When local social welfare bureaus were contacted by phone, there was typically either no answer or a long queue (more than 20-30 minutes wait-time to speak with a representative).

> 8The information for the remaining cities is available upon request from the authors.

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