Using data from recent surveys of migrants and local residents in 10 cities in 2005, this paper examines how migration influences measurements of urban poverty and inequality in China, and also compares how other indicators of well-being differ for migrants and local residents. Contrary to...

Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question we extend the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations, secondary...

In this paper, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate how well China's urban areas absorb migrant workers under the interaction of urbanization and industrialization. We applied an output-oriented BCC model to evaluate provincial and regional rural labor absorption efficiency in...

This paper investigates the determinants of employment choice of rural migrant workers across state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and various subtypes of non-state owned enterprises (non-SOEs) by taking into account unobservable characteristics that link the choice to migrate with the choice of...

The main objective of this paper is to propose a systematic approach to empirically analyse the effect of remittances on the utility of migrants, as proxied by their subjective well-being (SWB). Using data from a new survey on China (RUMiC), we estimate models in which a measure of subjective...

Using a national sample of Urban Household Surveys, we document several profound changes in China's wage structure during a period of rapid economic growth. Between 1992 and 2007, the average real wage increased by 202 percent, accompanied by a sharp rise in wage inequality. Decomposition...

This paper proposes a parametric approach to estimating a dynamic binary response panel data model that allows for endogenous contemporaneous regressors. Such a model is of particular value for settings in which one wants to estimate the effects of an endogenous treatment on a binary outcome. In...

This paper analyzes the costs of job loss in China, using unique new data from the Rural-to-Urban Migration in China (RUMIC) data set for the year 2009. We investigate conventional labor market outcomes upon displacement like the length of unemployment spells, hours worked and monthly earnings....

This paper studies differences in the motivation to be self-employed between rural migrants and urban residents in modern China. Estimates of the wage differential between self-employment and paid-employment obtained through a three-stage methodology using the 2002 China Household Income Project...

Rural-urban migrants in China appear to prefer nearby destination cities. To gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, we build a simple model in which migrants from rural areas choose among potential destination cities to maximize utility. The distance between a migrant's home village and...