Industry mean wages in China have exhibited sharply increased dispersion since the early 1990s. The upward trend in differences of average wages among major industry groups parallels increases in wage and income inequality not only between rural and urban sectors but within the urban economy as...

Intangible knowledge capital (IKC) – technology produced by workers but not embodied in them – can offset the "middle income trap" as China exhausts the benefits of international technology transfer. IKC is productivity-enhancing among Chinese enterprises – more so in domestically owned...

The impact of socio-economic status on health has been widely recognized, but the independent impact of social status alone on health remains inconclusive. We approach this challenge by exploiting a natural experiment in which subjects undergo a shift in their social status without considerable...

We explore the pace of increase in returns to schooling during the transition from planning to market over time across a number of Central and Eastern European countries, Russia, and China. We use metadata from 33 studies of 10 transition economies covering a period from 1975 through 2002. Our...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Our results show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of several interrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, and infrastructure capital; the infusion...

We apply a semi-parametric latent variable model to estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of private returns to schooling for college graduates during China’s reform between 1988 and 2002. We find that there were substantial sorting gains under the traditional system, but...

We find that second-generation effects of in utero and early childhood malnutrition on the school participation of the offspring of mothers who experienced the China Great Leap Forward Famine. The direct impact on entrance to senior high school is also negative, but smaller in magnitude than...

We estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of the private return to schooling for college graduates during China’s between 1988 and 2002. We pay special attention to the changing role of sorting by ability versus budget-constraint effects as China’s education policy has...

We estimate the effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health at older ages by exploiting variations in malaria exposure risk around birth that resulted from a universal malaria eradication campaign in colonial Taiwan in the early 20th century. We find that malaria exposure...