Abstract: Households are kernel of stakeholders in rural land consolidation. It is exceedingly meaningful to estimate the actual disposition effect of rural land consolidation on households’ livelihood strategies. In this paper, the types of households’ livelihood strategies are classified, and thereafter, on the basis of the livelihood capital measurement, PSM-DID method is employed to exclude other confounding factors and econometrically analyze the influence of rural land consolidation on the livelihood strategy of households. The robustness of the estimation results is tested by various matching methods and counterfactual method. The results show that: 1) Rural land consolidation can indeed significantly change the livelihood strategy of two-type-job households. But it does not significantly change the livelihood strategies of professional agriculture households or multi-type-job households. 2) Rural land consolidation has a significant impact on the livelihood strategies of traditional agriculture-dependent households, modern agriculture-dependent households and non-agriculture households. Both the proportions of traditional agriculture-dependent households and modern agriculture-dependent households have increased significantly, while the proportion of non-agriculture households has significantly reduced, which demonstrates that households can adjust their livelihood strategies to adapt to the changes after rural land consolidation. Or in other words, rural land consolidation promotes the diversification of households’ livelihoods. 3) A variety of matching methods and counterfactual method are adopted to carry out robustness tests which confirm that the main estimation results of this paper are considerably robust. Finally, suggestions are proposed based on this study. Incentive policies for different kinds of households should be developed. Specifically, two-type-job households should be encouraged to develop appropriate scale management of agriculture, and professional agriculture households should be assisted with training on modern agricultural technology or non-agricultural employment skills. Relying on local agricultural industry policies and rural land consolidation, modern agriculture-dependent households could develop regional unique agricultural industry, for example, leisure agriculture. Moreover, traditional agriculture-dependent households and non-agriculture households should be guided to realize the transfer of local surplus rural labor force and the transformation of livelihood to obtain diversified employment channels and income sources of households.

Key words: counterfactual test, DID, livelihood strategy, peasant household, PSM, rural land consolidation