Citation: Wang, X.; He, J.; Liao, T.F.; Gu, G. Does Air Pollution Influence the Settlement Intention of the Floating Population in China? Individual Heterogeneity and City Characteristics. Sustainability 2023, 15, 2995. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su15042995 Academic Editor: Pallav Purohit Received: 31 December 2022 Revised: 31 January 2023 Accepted: 1 February 2023 Published: 7 February 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). sustainability Article Does Air Pollution Influence the Settlement Intention of the Floating Population in China? Individual Heterogeneity and City Characteristics Xinxian Wang 1 , Jun He 2, * , Tim Futing Liao 3, * and Gaoxiang Gu 4 1 Institute of Urban and Demographic Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Shanghai 200023, China 2 Institute of Social Security, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China 3 Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA 4 School of Social Development, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China * Correspondence: jhe_2000@126.com (J.H.); tfliao@illinois.edu (T.F.L.) Abstract: Serious air pollution has caused widespread concern in Chinese society in recent years. China’s floating population plays an important role in China’s economic development, and the determinants of the floating population’s settlement intentions have attracted increasing attention. Using the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey Data (CMDS) and the satellite grid data of global PM2.5 concentration as well as city-level data, this study investigated the influences of air quality on migrants’ settlement intention, in particular, individual heterogeneity and city characteristics. Using an instrumental variable to correct for endogeneity, we found that air pollution has a significant negative effect on the settlement intentions of China’s floating population. Migrants who were older, better educated and with poorer health are more sensitive to air pollution with regard to settlement intention. Meanwhile, settlement intentions are also influenced by individual adaptability: Respondents with better air quality in their hometown are more sensitive to air pollution. Poor air pollution has not weakened the attractiveness of Tier-1 cities to the floating population, nor has the administrative level of a city. Keywords: air pollution; floating population; settlement intention; individual heterogeneity; city characteristics 1. Introduction In recent years, China has experienced rapid urbanization, with the urbanization level increased from 49.68% in 2010 to 63.89% in 2020 (China National Bureau of Statistics, 2021). In 2020, the number of floating population in the mainland reached 375.82 million, which rose from 221.43 million in 2010, an increase of 69.73% (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2021). At the same time, with a series of traditional barriers restricting population mobility have been broken, attracting and retaining floating population has become an important way to improve regional competitiveness. As an important contributor to China’s rapid urbanization and economic development, how to design and implement appropriate policy measures to help the floating population settle down in cities is an urgent issue faced by policymakers and scholars. For more than a decade now, the research results on the floating population’s settle- ment intention have increased rapidly. To the best of our knowledge, Zhu (2007) was one of the first scholars to pay attention to this subject. In a questionnaire survey based on Fujian Province in 2002, he found that only about 20.6% of floating population plan to permanently settle in cities [1]. Four years later, this figure increased to 35.8% in Fujian Province [2]. Prior research mainly takes the institutional, demographic, culture, social and economic factors as the influencing factors in floating population’s settlement intention [3–7]. However, Sustainability 2023, 15, 2995. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15042995 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability