Abstract: The high-quality and full employment of migrant workers is a key link in promoting the integrated development of urban and rural areas, promoting the citizenship of migrant workers, and achieving common prosperity. Based on the Rosen-Roback spatial equilibrium model, this paper demonstrates the impact of occupational location on the employment quality of migrant workers and its internal mechanism from the perspective of urban scale by using the data of China Migrants Dynamic Survey. The results show that, under the vote with feet, the occupational location of migrant workers has a significant effect on high-quality employment, which is expressed in the four aspects: wage income, labor burden, occupational level and employment security. Through the knowledge spillover effect, the labor pool effect and the social network effect, occupational location can deepen the accumulation of human capital, improve the efficiency of job matching, and expand the breadth and depth of social capital, then improving the employment quality of migrant workers. This effect of employment quality is characterized by significant heterogeneity of groups, and the interrupt effect generated from frequent urban mobility changes in occupational location is not conducive to high-quality employment of migrant workers. Therefore, it is necessary to accelerate the development of small and medium-sized cities, improve public employment services, build a unified labour market, promote the construction of new urbanization, pay attention to disadvantaged groups of rural migrant workers, optimize labour relations and labour protection, ensure employment and livelihoods, and help migrant workers to achieve high-quality employment.

Key words: migrant workers, occupational location, city size, employment quality