Can a public pension change how rural households transfer farmland? We study China’s New
Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), exploiting its age-60 eligibility threshold in a fuzzy regressiondiscontinuity
design applied to three waves of the China Family Panel Studies (2014–2018), with
identification coming from individual older-member pension receipt. Pension receipt raises the
probability that a household rents out farmland, and the response is concentrated entirely on
market-oriented transfer: paid rental-out rises sharply while zero-rent rental-out, a proxy for nonmonetized
relational transfer, does not move. The market-side response is largest among
households with the weakest cultural and structural ties to kin and village, for whom relational
transfer carries the lowest implicit cost. The estimates are robust to controls for child remittance,
off-farm labor, and non-farm income, and we find no contemporaneous discontinuity in private
kin transfers. Pension income thus does more than relax the household budget: it shifts the
institutional form of land transfer from relational support toward market-oriented exchange. Social
insurance, in this setting, operates as a land-market institution.
